Plain Jane

Film: The Heiress
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I work with a guy named Ron who has a thing for Olivia de Havilland. We’ve discussed this back and forth with him pushing de Havilland and me stumping for Barbara Stanwyck. While I won’t ever give over to Ron on this, he’s got me in the fact that Olivia de Havilland won a pair of Oscars and Stanwyck, for all her nominations, got skunked. One of those Oscars came from her role in The Heiress.

This is a strangely dark and angry little romance of both manners and ill manners. Young Catherine Sloper (de Havilland) lives a quiet and solitary life with her father, Dr. Austin Sloper (Ralph Richardson) and her aunt, Lavinia Penniman (Miriam Hopkins). She is a plain girl, shy and retiring, and spends her time doting on her father and tending to her embroidery. Her father compares her unfavorably to her late mother, who was vibrant and lovely. Her aunt, though, sees the good in her and wants nothing more than for her to be happy.

Enter Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), who immediately takes a liking to the girl and begins to pursue her romantically. At least that’s what he claims. Her father seems to disagree, though, thinking that Morris is after her for her inheritance. She’s inherited a tidy sum from her late mother, and stands to inherit twice that amount more when her father dies. Morris, we soon discover, is fairly dissolute. He spent his own fortune roaming around Europe, buying himself the finest clothing, and essentially ignoring his widowed sister and her five children. With that as his history, Dr. Sloper smells a bit of a rat.

The awkward Catherine refuses to see this and is convinced that he loves her for her and not for her money. Morris comes to plead his case, and does so unsuccessfully. He creates a plot to elope with Catherine in two nights, but she convinces him that they should elope that very evening. Running off to a small church and marrying, and damn the inheritance, since her father has threatened to rewrite his will should she marry Morris.

In a stunning turn of unexpected assholery, though, Morris doesn’t show up. Instead, he borrows money for passage and goes to California, completely avoiding the situation and abandoning Catherine to spinsterhood. Eventually, Dr. Sloper dies, and while he threatens to cut off Catherine’s inheritance, he does not, leaving her a very wealthy woman.

Of course, Morris returns. The remaining 15 minutes or so of the film, though are too good to spoil, so I won’t. Suffice to say that the ending is extremely satisfying.

There’s a lot of this film that really works, and a lot of what works is de Havilland. She was, as most of the classic Hollywood legends were, a stunningly attractive woman. Here, she is made plain and average. She’s not unattractive; she’s just very, very ordinary. She also tones down her vibrant personality in exchange for one that is painfully shy and drab. It’s a transformation similar to that of Charlize Theron in a film like Monster, or her own transformation in The Snake Pit.

I also like the performance of Ralph Richardson here. He’s generally an actor I enjoy watching, and in this film, he has a tendency to steal most of the scenes he is in. He plays the doctor with a combination of supreme knowledge and decided malice. One of the most effective scenes here is when he confronts Catherine about the real motives of Morris, telling her that she has no real good qualities save that her embroidery is consistently good. It’s a magnificent moment for both actors—he, acting as a doctor performing what he sees as lifesaving surgery without emotion, and she, realizing in that moment (as she tells Lavinia) that her own father dislikes her. His lack of emotion and her flood of realization at this cruelty are both palpable.

I should mention Montgomery Clift here. He’s certainly a capable actor, as his career attests, but I don’t love him here. Most of what draws me away from him is his accent. There is a touch of England in most of the characters in the film, while Clift comes across as a bit of a hick, like the lone American in a British drawing room drama. There’s something off-putting about the way he speaks throughout the film. Couple this with the fact that not a single person uses a single contraction, and there are times when the proceedings feel a bit too stiff and formal, or as formal as they can be when one person can’t seem to get the hang sounding like everyone else.

Regardless of that, The Heiress is a masterful film, precise and measured, and served with exactly the right combination of emotional reactions at exactly the right time. I have a feeling that this is a film that I will revisit again in the future, and I look forward to doing so. As much as I hate to say it, Ron might be onto something here.

Why to watch The Heiress: Olivia de Havilland at her very best, and an ending that is surprising.
Why not to watch: Montgomery Clift’s accent.

The End of Chaplin

Film: City Lights; Monsieur Verdoux
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on rockin’ flatscreen.

I enjoy silent comedies quite a bit. Of the great silent comedians, I enjoy Harold Lloyd, I have great respect for Chaplin, and I have a deep and abiding love for Buster Keaton. Naturally, this means I watched all of Keaton’s films pretty quickly. Chaplin I’ve been savoring a bit, at least until now. The three comedians were all quite different. Lloyd was in many ways the most American in his characters’ outlook. Keaton offered a more zen outlook on his comedy. Chaplin is all about the pathos.

City Lights doesn’t stray too far from the formula that worked for him his entire career. Like most silent comedies, the plot is very simple. The action tends to drive that simple plot forward very slowly, because the action is more about the slapstick than the actual story. In this case, the plot is pretty easily resolved, with the additional material there only for laughs.

That’s not a bad thing—these are good laughs. Chaplin plays his trademark Tramp character. Early on, he encounters a blind flower seller (Virginia Cherrill) and becomes smitten by her beauty and her tragedy. He also rescues a man (Harry Myers) about to commit suicide. These two things seem unrelated, but will merge as the film closes. It turns out that the man the Tramp rescues is a drunken millionaire. He thanks our hero by taking him out for a night on the town. The problem is that when he wakes up and sobers up, he has no memory of the previous night—not his suicide attempt, his rescue, or the evening that followed.

In the mean time, the Tramp spends time with the blind flower girl, and discovers that there is an expensive operation that can cure her blindness. He also discovers that the girl owes her landlord rent and is about to be evicted. Unable to get the millionaire to remember him, the Tramp takes (and subsequently loses) a job as a street sweeper. Eventually, his only recourse to cash for the girl is to sign up for a boxing match. He makes a deal with the other boxer to throw the fight and split the $50 purse, but is forced to fight another man instead, who won’t take the deal.

Of course, this is a comedy, which means it has to work out in the end. The ending is sweet and heartfelt, if perhaps a bit twee. But it’s cute and impossible not to smile at.

But the plot, sweet as it may be, is not the reason to pay attention here. The whole purpose of the film is to see what Chaplin does throughout. The gags are as good as we’ve come to expect from Chaplin, with the boxing match near the end a true highpoint in not just the film, but in his catalog. It’s silly stuff, the kind of thing that young children would find riotously funny today (at least the non-jaded children, and even some of them). One of Chaplin’s great talents was finding a gag and playing it as many different ways as he could—the back and forth shuffle of Chaplin, his opponent, and the referee here being a prime example.

For many people, City Lights is Chaplin at his finest. That’s a hard thing to argue against, even if my preference might be more for the opening half hour of Modern Times. There’s no doubting that while his last silent film is stronger in places, City Lights is more consistently funny and on plot all the way through.

If anything, I’d have liked this to be a little longer. Chaplin was and is a joy, and a running time of under 90 minutes feels like short change.

That shorter running time may have better served Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, because at the 90 minute mark here, I was ready for the film to be over, and knew that there was still a good half hour left to go. This is the story of a Bluebeard, a man who marries women and murders them for their money and property. He tells us at the start of the film that life was fine until he lost his job in a bank when the markets crashed. Now, with a wife and child to support, he turned to a different line of work (killing widows) to make ends meet.

We see him at work several times during the course of the film, and as the film starts, we learn from the family of his latest conquest that Verdoux’s latest (and late) wife has just emptied her bank accounts of 60,000 francs. We cut to the man himself cleaning up after the deed and engaging to sell the home. The prospective buyer is another widow who he sets upon wooing, a plot that will take us to near the end of the film.

In the meantime, he is already married not only to his first wife, but to several others, and he proceeds to go on a sort of murder tour around France, bumping off women and collecting on them, spinning crazy stories about impending bank collapses to get them to draw their money out, and then doing the deed and making off with the benefits. One of these wives, Annabella Bonheur (Martha Raye) has a nasty habit of not dying, leaving him in something of a predicament.

Thanks to the Hays Code, Monsieur Verdoux is destined to be caught by the end of the film. Criminals, after all, couldn’t win under the Hays Code, and no one could be seen to truly benefit from the commission of a crime. So naturally, everything will come to a head, and does when the foghorn-voiced Annabella arrives as a guest for his latest wedding.

My problem with Monsieur Verdoux is not that it isn’t well made or that it isn’t entertaining. It’s beautifully filmed and it’s acted well, and there are even a few laughs in it here and there. My problem is that it seems so opposite the typical Chaplin comedy. While terrible things happened to the Tramp all the time, they were always caused by circumstances beyond the poor guy’s control. The Tramp was always lovable and sweet, someone whose tragedies were all the more poignant because we as the audience want him to be okay. Verdoux in this film is cruel and heartless, everything the Tramp seemed to stand against.

I don’t really mind heartlessness, but I don’t like it for its own sake, and that, more or less, is how I took Monsieur Verdoux. Chaplin aims for pitch black comedy, and while it seems impossible that he would ever miss completely, he misses on quite a bit of this. I’m not used to, or much in favor of a Chaplin character who isn’t worth rooting for, and Verdoux is simply not. This film comes off as mean spirited in a lot of ways, and that seems so wrong.

There are other, similar comedies, of course. Arsenic and Old Lace, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and even a film like The Ladykillers cover similar territory, and do it with better humor and a lot more panache. I’m disappointed here, not because this is a Chaplin talkie, but because a film like The Great Dictator was left off the List when it much more rightfully belongs here. Monsieur Verdoux covers territory better mapped by others, and Chaplin is better than playing this sort of rogue, no matter how charming he might appear.

Why to watch City Lights: It’s sweet and heartfelt.
Why not to watch: It’s over too quickly.

Why to watch Monsieur Verdoux: Of the three great silent comedians, only Chaplin made a solid transition to talkies.
Why not to watch: He made better talkies.

An Announcement of Sorts

No review today. Sorry.

I'm realizing that I've got a little more than a year to go on the giant-ass list I've been working on. There are a number of other lists that I've compiled that I will be working on in the near future. With the new version of Blogger, I've got a little bit more freedom to put things together the way I want. If you look directly to the right, you'll see a few new things. Specifically, you'll see links to other pages of film lists that I'll be completing in the months and years ahead.

First, there is a trio of horror film lists that I've found that all look interesting. These lists come from Time Out London, Bravo Television, and Fangoria magazine. There's a bunch of crossover (particularly on the first two), but still multiple dozens that have passed by me.

The bigger list is actually five more lists--the complete collection of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress nominees in Oscar history. Again, I'll have already reviewed a number of these, but there are plenty I won't have touched. I'm excited about that particular project because I'm going to do something else with it as well. When I complete a given set of nominees, I'll take a look back at them and determine which I would have picked, had I been given a vote.

So, while I'm still concentrating on the main list for the moment, expect to see some deviation here and there moving forward.

Why am I Doing This Again?

Film: Blonde Cobra
Format: Internet video on laptop.

For whatever reason, I’ve been on something of an art film kick lately, and Blonde Cobra is merely the latest in the string of video oddities I’ve been watching lately. Like many films in this pseudo-genre, I’m thrown off-kilter by what I see on screen. I don’t find anything to latch myself onto as even a frame of reference for this film.

According to the story (I’m loathe to call it a legend), the fragments that make up this film actually come from the remnants of two other films created by Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith (who created then as-yet-unseen-by-me Flaming Creatures). A fire destroyed part of what they had created, and Ken Jacobs took what survived and cobbled together…this. I don’t have any explanation for what remains here.

The film consists of three parts, more or less, and none of the parts seems to have much to do with any of the other parts. Frequently, we’re given nothing to look at but a black screen with rather florid narration over the top. This narration, which comes from Jack Smith, tells bizarre stories that link to perverse sexual practices with elements of sadism and furious self-abuse. He tells, for instance, of the time when he was a young child and ignored by his mother. Upon meeting another boy, he lights a match and burns the other boy’s genitalia. The middle story deals with a group of nuns that are evidently having sexual relations with a plaster statue of Christ, which culminates in them being punished by being whipped with rosaries.

Yeah, I don’t really know, either.

It’s evident that there’s a great deal here that is, while not precisely homoerotic, definitely homosexual in source and intent. Initially, it seems that Smith’s monologues seem to be blaming his mother’s inattention and a sort of overbearing Catholic authority for his own homosexuality. There’s also a great deal of self-loathing at play. That Smith on camera dresses in baby clothing and as a startlingly ugly transvestite is perhaps a part of this. More, though comes through at the end when Smith is complaining about a life lived in futility and for no purpose, putting a toy gun to his head and pulling the trigger followed by flashes of cemetery imagery. In fact, the last thing Smith shouts as the film ends is “What went wrong?”

Really, I’m floundering here. I’m trying to work out something that this film might actually be about, and I’m really coming up empty. Blonde Cobra seems very much to be about nothing but itself. It is despairing and strange, and difficult to watch. It is also thankfully just over half an hour long.

For me, the most difficult part of the film is Smith’s voiceover. He comes across as taking this experiment as casually as possible, which I don’t think is the case. For much of the film, he sounds a great deal like a cartoon character, a cross between Snagglepuss and a carnival barker. Again, knowing nothing about Smith (but knowing that several people have warned me about his Flaming Creatures), I have no idea if this is his natural speaking voice or something affected for this film. I suspect the later, but have no proof.

All told, I’m simply happy that this is a film I’ve put into the rearview mirror and that I won’t have to watch it again. And I probably won’t. I can’t help but think that I’d probably have been better served to knock out films like this a year or so ago if only so I didn’t have to spend my time watching them now.

I wrote this much without consulting The Book, but felt I should give the film one last chance to make itself relevant to me. It’s worth noting that The Book doesn’t explain anything about Blonde Cobra either, save for calling it one of the important films of the New York underground scene of the 1960s. And with that, I’m done trying to figure out what I just spent half an hour watching.

Need to see this and willing to give over half an hour? Click here.

Why to watch Blonde Cobra: Experimental film had to come from somewhere.
Why not to watch: It will damage your soul.

Billy the Shake's Greatest Hits

Film: Campanadas a Medianoche (Chimes at Midnight; Falstaff)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

My guess, if I had to make one, is that William Shakespeare enjoyed writing the character of Falstaff. It’s entirely possible, though, that he was simply a favorite of the rabble. Regardless, Sir John Falstaff appears prominently in four of Shakespeare’s plays. He is one of Shakespeare’s more interesting characters, and that’s really saying something. Falstaff is primarily a comic character, one of Shakespeare’s clowns, but there is a true depth and humanity to the character. Falstaff is tragic in the extreme, with enough character faults for an army, but a man it is almost impossible not to like, making his tragedy more poignant.

Campanadas a Medianoche (Chimes at Midnight, or more commonly Falstaff) takes many of the important scenes from Shakespeare’s two “Henry IV” plays, “Henry V” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and puts them in one place, a sort of Falstaff’s greatest hits reel, although there is quite a bit here that concerns Prince Hal far more than it does Falstaff and his ilk. Still, it is Falstaff’s film. There is nothing really new here for those who know their Shakespeare; it merely offers the advantage of being the condensed and concentrated Sir John in one package rather than spread out over four.

Falstaff is a rogue, of course, in every sense of the word. He has not many positive qualities save that he truly does seem to love his friends. This doesn’t stop him from harassing them, beating them, and taking the credit for everything they do. He is vastly overweight, a drunkard and a whoremonger as well as a coward. Into this role steps Orson Welles, a good 20 years past his trim physique in Citizen Kane, and larger than his bloated character in Touch of Evil. This is the Welles I remember as a kid—hugely fat, but possessed still of that remarkable voice.

Fortunately for us, this is still Welles in possession of his skill in filmmaking, because Campanadas a Medianoche is the sort of brilliance that few filmmakers could legitimately attempt, let alone pull off. Welles, having become something of an arthouse director at this point in his career, apparently felt free enough to direct what he wanted and do what he wanted, damn the critics and the public both. He plays Falstaff as close to perfectly as can be imagined, a combination of cowardice and bravado, telling massive lies with a straight face, claiming credit for everything that happens around him.

While the film focuses on Falstaff, the story is really about Prince Hal (Keith Baxter), who eventually becomes King Henry V. He is a dissolute youth, preferring the company of Falstaff and other thieves and hooligans. He responds to the call of his father, Henry IV (John Gielgud) to attend the Battle of Shrewsbury and help put down the rebellion of Henry Percy (Norman Rodway). The battle done and Percy slain, Hal returns to his waywardness and sloth. The death of his father, though, causes Hal to awaken to his responsibility, which is where we get Henry V.

It is the relationship between Hal and Falstaff that is most interesting. It’s obvious that the two love each other, but it’s evident earlier in the film that Hal is aware that he will have to divorce himself from Falstaff when he becomes king. There is a bit of play acting, first with Falstaff as king, then with Hal as king and Falstaff as Hal. It is in this scene that we learn of the eventual fate of the pair. Falstaff, playing as Hal, begs his father not to banish Falstaff, heaping praise upon himself. While he is pretending to be Hal, it is evident that he is begging Hal to keep him close when he does become king, and Hal acknowledges that he will eventually have to force the man away.

Shakespeare, when done well, is sublime, and this is Shakespeare done very well indeed. It’s a shame Welles didn’t get through the entire catalog. In many ways, a good adaptation of Shakespeare is like watching a well-loved film multiple times. We know what is there, but there is true joy in seeing it acted well and with conviction. Welles, for all his missed potential and physical dissolution, remains one of the three or four best cinematic directors of Shakespeare to ever yell, “Action!”

It’s also worth noting that the Battle of Shrewsbury is magnificent here. While the film is in black-and-white and certainly limited by technology, the battle sequence is still highly effective. Films like Braveheart stole unabashedly from Shrewsbury here, and despite the lack of color, these scenes still look modern.

Campanadas a Medianoche has never gotten a DVD release in the U.S., making it extremely difficult to find. You could do worse than to follow this link.

Why to watch Campanadas a Medianoche: Shakespeare the way it should be done.
Why not to watch: By this time in his career Welles was planetary in scope.

Feminism

Film: De Stilte Rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence) Format: VHS from Founders Memorial Library on big ol’ television.

I live in a town with a large university, which gives me the benefit of having a gigantic additional library at my disposal. While I can’t get things through interlibrary loan, I can have access to the library collection. Since it’s a public university, my taxes pay for it, so I get that for free. I renewed my card today and walked out with a couple of films, in particular De Stilte Rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence), which I haven’t otherwise been able to find.

This is an odd film, one of the first real cinematic visions of violent feminism. It unquestionably follows a film like Jeanne Dielmann and presages films like Thelma and Louise. The story is as odd as it is simple; three women who don’t know each other brutally murder a shopkeeper in Amsterdam and are put on trial. Before the trial, they are investigated by a psychiatrist who tries to determine what led these women to commit murder. She shocks the court by declaring that the women are legally sane, a declaration that sends waves through the court, her life, and potentially society.

As the film progresses, we learn more and more about the three women. Christine (Edda Barends) takes center stage in terms of the title, but is also the character who speaks the least. After the murder and her arrest, she becomes non-communicative, refusing to speak about any issue. The psychiatrist Janine (Cox Habbema) questions her, and while Christine draws pictures, she says nothing. She is more successful with the other two. Annie (Nelly Frijda) is a divorced waitress who speaks openly and laughs constantly. Anna (Henriette Tol) is a secretary who has started to recognize that she not only has a particular power, but that her abilities are both wasted and purposefully ignored.

The three women, of course, are meant to be the center of the narrative, but in general, it is Janine who takes center stage. The film is in many ways less about what the women did or even why they did it and more about how Janine comes to understand their actions, and eventually to at least partly condone those actions. Much of her awareness comes from Anna, who, of the three women, is the most forceful in turning the questions back on her questioner.

While the story of our three murderers is an interesting one, Goris is right to focus on Janine, because her awakening is the most interesting in the film. We have in her an accomplished, powerful woman in her own right—a psychiatrist frequently called on for expert testimony. As the film progresses, we learn, though, that she is still a second-class citizen in her own home. A dinner party requires that she do all the cooking, for instance, and afterwards she is expected to submit to sex whether she wants to or not. It is events like this that wake her up to the cause behind the attack on the shopkeeper, since by the end of the film it is evident that she does understand the why of the event even though the three women never tell her explicitly.

Perhaps the most effective device used in the film is the series of short sequences depicting the men in the lives of the imprisoned women. In each case—and this becomes true for Janine as well—the men are unable to come to grips with the events at the shop except in terms of how those events affect them specifically. Christine’s husband, for instance, can only question why she would do this to him—he’s had to ship the children off to other locations because he is incapable of caring for them himself. Anna’s boss comments that she was a necessary part of his business, but in a flashback we see that her function was strictly to keep things organized, and any opinion she expressed was purposefully and specifically brushed aside. Events like these lead us as audience down the same path as Janine so that, by the end of the film, we understand the motive behind the attack as well. Janine experiences the same thing when her husband (Eddie Brugman) tries to force her to change her testimony so that it won’t reflect poorly on him or his career as a lawyer.

My one complaint here is the music. It is loud, jarring, and often highly reminiscent of this film’s musically unfortunate decade. I’m reminded, in fact, of a film like Ladyhawke that is crippled today by its dated and cheese-filled musical score. Even though the music here is plainly dated and often ugly, there are still some interesting choices. For instance, some scenes (particularly the one in which Janine truly begins to understand the women) have a soundtrack that is in many ways akin to a horror movie. And it’s appropriate—what Janine is realizing is horrific.

This is an impressive film start to finish. The ending is shocking, and Goris’s choice to leave that ending ambiguous was a smart one. While we don’t know what Janine will do next, we know that it will be significant. We don’t know the outcome of the trial, but it is not the result that we care about. What we want is to understand, and Goris leaves us enough breadcrumbs to follow the trail and arrive at the conclusion she wishes.

Why to watch De Stilte Rond Christine M.: A shocking and powerful feminist statement.
Why not to watch: The music is wretched.

Zoom Zoom

Film: Wavelength
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Art films and I often don’t get along. I say that not as a defense of any review I make of said art films but as a statement of fact. Frequently, such cinematic experiments make me feel pretty stupid, as if I should be getting more from them than I am. Wavelength, considered a critical experimental film by Canadian director Michael Snow, is such a work. I’ve had a link to this film for a long time and have actually started the film more than once, but until today, never really made it more than a few minutes in. It’s unusual to say that a film with a running time well under an hour is daunting and difficult to watch, but Wavelength is both of those things.

To give it a chance to work, I decided that the best and fairest thing was to really watch it from start to finish in as close to one take as I could make it. In the interest of fairness, I was forced to pause it once briefly, but I got through the entire running time of about 43 minutes in something like 44:30, and my pause was early in the running time.

I’m certain there are a number of ways to consider this film, the most obvious being that this is the story of a single camera zoom. That is, more or less, what it is. The film starts at the end of a large room that looks like nothing so much as a loft apartment. Over the course of the film’s running time, the camera zooms from its initial position to a single point on the far wall.

I’d love to say that’s it, and for many an experimental film, that would probably be enough. Snow gives us some things to deal with as viewers of the film, though. First, there are four events that take place in the room. First, a woman enters with two men carrying a piece of furniture. She instructs them as to where she wants it placed, and then everyone leaves. This happens right at the start. Second, the woman returns with an acquaintance. The two listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio; actually, the only listen to most of the song. Third, just before the midpoint, a man enters the room and collapses on the floor, the camera zooming past him as it continues. Fourth, the woman returns and reports the body of the man, who she claims to have never seen before.

Throughout, we are given the same view of the room with its glacial zoom through a number of different lenses and filters. The screen sometimes flashes white, shows the room in a deep red tone or in a reverse image. There is also a constant hum of a tone throughout the film’s running time. The pitch of the single played note slowly rises and gains in intensity as the camera nears the far wall. This note becomes an important part of the film’s environment, soon eclipsing virtually all other potential sounds we might here, like that of the traffic rushing past the window. Additionally, the constant changing of lighting and filters does produce something akin to the passage of time, giving us something that is the equivalent of day and night during the duration.

This was, I will not mince words here, an ordeal, but one that I am in part glad to have gone through. Wavelength is not an easy film, but it is one that pays a strange sort of dividend by being watched all at once (or virtually so) rather than a minute or so at a time. That sort of episodic viewing, clicking the film on for a minute and pausing it, is extremely tempting, in no small part because of the increasing pain of the single note on the soundtrack.

While Snow attempts to portray the film as existing as a single shot, there is a great deal of evidence of cutting here as well as some film editing. In the last of the four episodes for instance, the woman in the apartment appears as a ghostly figure, semi-transparent and flickering in and out of existence as she calls for help. Still, even at these moments where it appears that we might gain some sort of clue to what Snow wants us to see, the camera continues its relentless zoom, evident at this part of the film to be centered on a picture on that far wall. The events, in other words, take place not in front of the camera or because they are important for us to see, but in spite of the camera or with no real relation to the camera. The collapsed man, for instance is soon zoomed past, presumably still on the floor but no longer visible to us.

I believe it may be impossible to call the experience of watching Wavelength enjoyable. It is not, but it is also not intended to be. It is instead a cinematic trial of endurance in the viewer and an artistic statement both strange and strangely captivating. I cannot say that I will watch this film again in the near future—I may never do so again—but for one reason or another, it is a film that will stay with me as a piece of artistic expression for a very long time.

If you've got the stomach for it, click here.

Why to watch Wavelength: Experimental film at a peak.
Why not to watch: It’s a single camera zoom.