The Wavelength Papers

Introduction to Notes for Wavelength MALCOLM TURVEY Longtime readers of October hardly need reminding that artist Michael Snow, who passed away in January 2023 at the age of ninety-four, was of singular importance to our journal, and especially to one of our founding editors, Annette Michelson. Michelson’s first article devoted exclusively to a North American filmmaker “of the independent persuasion” was about Snow and especially his film Wavelength (1967), and this film in many ways exemplified the advanced art of the late 1960s and ’70s that October was founded, in part, to defend and champion: art that was perceived as analytic rather than expressive; that expanded its medium even while hyperbolizing its defining conventions; that foregrounded temporality and duration; and that prompted cognitive reflection on the viewer’s part about their phenomenological experience of the work and its possible sociopolitical ramifications.1 (In retrospect, the film is also notable for its humor, which, while not addressed in much depth at the time, was partly informed by the Duchampian legacy of puns and wordplay, often involving the titles of works, that also influenced October and its early canon of artists. Humor was to remain a major, but underappreciated, feature of Snow’s work.) Snow first appeared in October in issue No. 4 (Autumn 1977), with his “Notes for Rameau’s Nephew,” about his film Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974), his contribution to the so-called New Talkie of the 1970s.2 The same issue contained an article by critic Amy Taubin, who had acted in Wavelength, about an exhibition of Snow’s photographs at MoMA.3 Almost two years later, Michelson published in these pages her second major text on Snow, “About Snow,” in which she revisited Wavelength, but this time through the lens of a more politicized and psychoanalytically inflected ver1. Annette Michelson, “Toward Snow (Part 1),” Artforum 9, no. 10 (June 1971), pp. 30–37. Reprinted in Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), pp. 165–86. 2. Michael Snow, “Notes for Rameau’s Nephew,” October 4 (Autumn 1977), pp. 43–57. 3. Amy Taubin, “Doubled Visions,” October 4 (Autumn 1977), pp. 33–42. Taubin has recently published a short account of her involvement in the making of Wavelength that includes some invaluable information about its production. See Taubin, “Michael Snow: 1928–2023,” Millennium Film Journal 77 (Spring 2023), p. 84. OCTOBER 184 Spring 2023, pp. 27–28. © 2023 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00482 OCTOBER 28 sion of phenomenology, which she took from French film theorist Jean-Louis Baudry.4 Now, according to Michelson, the film affirms the spectator as “transcendental subject” by offering a “gratifying confirmation of a threatened sovereignty” to audiences, something that is even more true, Michelson argued, of Snow’s film La région centrale (1970).5 Snow would feature in many subsequent essays published in the journal, including in a cluster of texts devoted to his work in issue No. 114 in 2005, among which was an interview with Snow conducted by Michelson about his work in music.6 He was also the subject of an October Files (No. 24) co-edited by Michelson and Kenneth White. In recognition of Snow’s profound influence on October and his signal contribution to North American avant-garde film, we are happy to publish a selection of his handwritten notes about the planning and making of Wavelength from his archive, which is currently housed at the Ontario Gallery of Art. This archive remains largely unexplored by scholars, and, as Federico Windhausen shows in his introductory article about the notes on Wavelength, they shed new light on this much-studied, canonical film. The editors of October are deeply grateful to Peggy Gale and the Ontario Gallery of Art for their permission to publish these notes, and, along with Mani Mazinani at Michael Snow’s studio, for facilitating their reproduction here. We also thank Federico Windhausen for his help in selecting which notes to reproduce, and for his illuminating introduction to them. 4. Annette Michelson, “About Snow,” October 8 (Spring 1979), pp. 111–25. Reprinted in Michelson, On the Eve of the Future, pp. 187–209. 5. Ibid., pp. 197–98. 6. October 114 (Autumn 2005), pp. 3–60. The Wavelength Papers FEDERICO WINDHAUSEN It’s all in the work. Writing, talking: some other things.1 —Michael Snow, 1968 What remains of the North American avant-garde of the 1960s and ’70s? Certainly many more films than filmmakers, but a paper trail as well. Housed in museums, university libraries, film archives, and personal collections across the United States and Canada, a decentralized and ever-expanding set of documents and ephemera is shaping and informing numerous research-based projects in curation, academic scholarship, and film restoration. And yet, in contrast to this contemporary trend, the collected papers of Michael Snow at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto have yet to be explored in depth. A notable exception is Elizabeth Legge’s monograph on Snow’s Wavelength (1967), which cites some of the notes he kept during the film’s conceptualization and production.2 Because the analysis of those notes was not one of Legge’s primary objectives, however, her book reproduces only three of the pages in Snow’s Wavelength file. The occasion of Snow’s recent passing will doubtless be met by various forms of retrospection, and this small contribution to that extended moment of reflection makes available in print a greater number of the Wavelength files than have previously been published. They represent a rare instance of a canonical avant-garde film’s being accompanied by a significant corpus of scribblings, illustrations, and diagrams. This selection, comprising twenty-four pages taken from the filmmaker’s unbound notes, introduces some of the themes and questions that Snow was putting to paper during the project’s year of gestation. Below, I offer a few remarks on those pages. They are admittedly somewhat arbitrary, but they are intended to bring to light some of the archive’s lesser-known revelations. 1. Michael Snow, “Letter from Michael Snow” (dated August 21, 1968), Film Culture 46 (Autumn 1967, published October 1968), p. 5. 2. Elizabeth Legge, Michael Snow: Wavelength (London: Afterall Books; Cambridge: MIT Press), 2009. OCTOBER 184 Winter 2023, pp. 29–32. © 2023 October Magazine, Ltd., and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00483 30 OCTOBER In part because the papers in the file do not appear to be in strict chronological order, attempting to construct a reliable timeline of development seems a futile endeavor. Nevertheless, we might assume, speculatively, that the versions of the film that seem furthest from the completed work are among Snow’s earliest, in which case his notes for an homage to Duke Ellington stand out as a striking contrast to what would eventually emerge as Wavelength. The filmmaker appears to have considered incorporating into that film a recorded version of the Ellington/Strayhorn standard “Day Dream” and including a biographical account of Ellington’s life, spoken directly to the camera. An explicit tribute to a musician would have been an atypical gesture by Snow, although the focus on jazz points back to his earlier film New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), which showcased the improvisations of saxophonist Albert Ayler’s quartet, along with shots of Snow’s Walking Woman sculpture. Tonally, an Ellington tribute with “Day Dream” on its soundtrack would have had little in common with the Ayler group’s dense and intense version of free jazz, and Snow seems to have imagined moving in another direction with a languorous mood piece. That mood might be characterized as an erotic reverie. One constant throughout the project’s variations is the formal feature of a gradual zoom that transforms the immobile camera’s perspective from a wide shot to a close-up, and in the Ellington film, the zoom was to move toward a “beautiful blond white nude girl” in a room. Later ideas included a zoom toward a photograph of Billie Holiday on a wall, a painting by Tom Wesselmann (likely one of his Pop-art nudes), and even a “photograph of a child (Catholic movie!).” Appearing most frequently in the notes are references to a “nude girl in room on couch near window through which cars etc. passing maybe seen,” a woman whose visible behavior could have included masturbation, reading, talking on the phone, exercising, putting on makeup, getting dressed, or simply “let[ting] her do anything she wants.” Other activities that Snow envisioned for this woman involved kissing him on camera, receiving oral sex, or saying “something like ‘why don’t you come here and fuck me?’” On one page, Snow writes that “girls are just like donuts or hot dog buns,” and on another, the parallel or analogy between form and content is made evident in his grouping together of the words “zoom film,” “sexual,” and “going IN.” A version of Wavelength developed along such explicitly scopophilic lines could have kept close company with films such as Albie Thoms’s Bolero (1967) and Stephen Dwoskin’s Moment (1968). Had Snow attended the EXPRMNTL 4 Festival in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, where Wavelength won a major prize in 1967, he might have noticed a vague resemblance between his early ideas and Thoms’s film, which was also screened in competition. Set to Ravel’s composition, Bolero tracks continuously down a road toward a seated woman holding a red umbrella, eventually ending with a dissolve into a close-up of her eye. In Moment, which has an electronic score by Ron Geesin, the camera remains fixed on the face of a supine woman who appears to have an orgasm; The Wavelength Papers 31 throughout the film, she looks directly at the camera, or past it toward the filmmaker, meeting the potential voyeurism of the film’s setup with her own look numerous times. If Snow had in mind a set of concerns comparable to Dwoskin’s—an exploration of the woman’s agency in relation to the camera, or of a power dynamic activated through acts of looking and filming, for example— those interests are difficult to detect in his notes, where he manifests far fewer affinities with the queer and polymorphously perverse strain of underground cinema than with its more masculine and heterosexual mainstream.3 When asked about his film’s duration of (approximately) forty-five minutes, Snow famously responded with the phrase “Nice fuck.”4 If we consider his reply alongside Snow’s removal of explicitly sexual or erotic imagery, as disclosed by the notes, Wavelength can be aligned with an important, contemporaneous development in American avant-garde cinema, one with which the film has not previously been linked. Twenty-five years ago, in these pages, Annette Michelson proposed that Tom Tom the Piper’s Son, the film first presented by Ken Jacobs in 1969, exemplifies a period-specific “displacement of cinematic desire,” one that deviates from the “expressive erotics of the human body” of earlier experimental filmmakers.5 According to Michelson, in Jacobs’s film, that body “is now deflected, reoriented, sublimated, articulated” through another “corpus, [that] of film itself,” a cinephilic displacement “coincident with” the removal of depictive imagery in the era’s emblematic flicker films.6 Leaving aside the overall persuasiveness of Michelson’s historical narrative, we can isolate in her account a key notion with special relevance for Wavelength, namely, her assertion that the absence of the eroticized body in American experimental film of the late 1960s can be understood not as a rejection of sex in the cinema but rather as a “sublimatory moment.”7 For Michelson, the critic who recalled having told Parker Tyler that “all film is erotic, that’s what it’s about,” the ostensibly less carnal, presumably more analytic films of the period were actually channeling the viewer’s drives and desires elsewhere, perhaps intensifying the gratifications and pleasures of cinematic form.8 Hence the extended zoom in a room as a “nice fuck.” Despite Michelson’s long-standing critical engagement with Snow’s work, his film does not figure in her essay. But her attempt to identify a shift in the New York–based avant-garde— 3. Snow went on to realize a version of his idea for a shot of a “white nude girl” in a room in his film Presents (1980). In an interview with Snow, Scott MacDonald brings up the feminist critique of the film. For Snow’s response, see Scott MacDonald, “Michael Snow,” in A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 70–74. 4. Simon Hartog, “Ten Questions to Michael Snow,” Cinim 3 (Spring 1969), p. 3. 5. Annette Michelson, “Gnosis and Iconoclasm: A Case Study of Cinephilia,” October 83 (Winter 1998), p. 15. 6. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 7. Ibid., p. 16. 8. Mark Webber, “Annette Michelson,” Cinematograph 7 (2013), p. 26. (This special issue is also cited as Speaking Directly: Oral Histories of the Moving Image.) 32 OCTOBER an emerging aesthetics of sublimation and displacement—might serve as a useful historical and conceptual framework, one that illuminates not only the finished film but also the fragments of thinking as well as the additions and removals that have been registered across the Wavelength papers. Snow’s file also includes developing ideas about sound experimentation related to language, music, and noise; different scenarios for “events [that] leave traces, reverberate and echo,” such as a crowded party that would include a “political conversation” about a “war against China”; snippets of intriguing questions (“too tense?”); and unrealized reflexive gestures (crossed out is the possibility of a “zoom to image of camera in mirror”). As Wavelength becomes more formally elaborate and intricate, the notes reflect the increased importance of processes of mediation and heterogeneous materials within Snow’s project, as he meticulously plots out how and when to insert noise, disruption, and opacity into the work.9 Additionally, another segment of the Snow archive (not reproduced here) documents the reception of the film through letters and articles, providing a glimpse into its considerable early impact. One of the most lauded, analyzed, and cited experimental films of the second half of the twentieth century, Wavelength is also a work that was discussed often and at length by its creator, across a time span of many decades. As one film scholar has observed, the commentator who is mindful of the filmmaker’s prolixity and discursive facility can either “cleave closely to Snow’s remarks and...risk being turned into someone who merely elaborates on and explains the artist’s ‘authoritative’ comments” or search for “novel things to say” that might be perceived as “fanciful misprisions.”10 Those are two of the most familiar options, to be sure, but as the papers make apparent, Wavelength has hardly been exhausted as an object of study. If we have embarked upon a new phase of the reception of the film, and of Snow’s work more generally, perhaps the filmmaker’s notes can be considered anew within that ongoing conversation. 9. Enrico Camporesi has commented that the recent restoration of Wavelength on film that was carried out by John Klacsmann of Anthology Film Archives in New York confirmed Snow’s use of “assorted emulsions and film supports: Kodachrome and Ektachrome, Kodak color negatives and positives, Du Pont black-and-white reversal [film], and Agfachrome color reversal [film].” What Camporesi describes as “a kind of bricolage not devoid of a playful character” involved a great degree of deliberation and effort, as the notes suggest. Enrico Camporesi, “Michael Snow, l’ironia del bricoleur,” doppiozero (January 12, 2023). My translation. 10. R. Bruce Elder, “Elizabeth Legge. Michael Snow: Wavelength,” University of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 2 (Spring 2011), p. 286. Notes for Wavelength MICHAEL SNOW OCTOBER 184 Spring 2023, pp. 33–57. © 2023 October Magazine, Ltd., and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00484 All images: Michael Snow, original notes for Wavelength, ca. 1966–67. Photographs by Mani Mazinani. Michael Snow Fonds (Box-File # 11-2), E. P. Taylor Library and Archives, Art Gallery of Ontario.