Michael Snow's Wavelength
The Toronto International Film Festival (or TIFF, as it is affectionately - or mischievously - called) is in full swing.
It is a long festival, since it really does try to accommodate all tastes - from the star gazing fans to those who watch and decipher the latest avant-garde films on the menu.
I admit, I am a bit of the latter, although part of my excuse is that the blockbuster movies will soon be in the theaters anyway.
I went to a screening on Monday which was part of the Wavelengths series (which is in honor of the old guard avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow's 1967 Wavelength). Below is a synopsis of Wavelength from Bright Lights Film Journal:
Wavelength [is a] 45-minute intermittent forward zoom taken at slightly altered camera positions in a loft. Briefly men and women enter and exit the frame, triggering the pretense of a narrative. But in reality, the viewer becomes increasingly absorbed in the purpose of the zoom and where it's heading. Wavelength ends on a photograph of the sea that has been placed flat on a wall between two windows. On the soundtrack we hear, among other things, a sine wave.I studied "experimental films," as such films are called amongst the few die-hards, and I even produced two that were exhibited nationally and internationally. But, shortly after that, I stopped making such films and resumed textile design, which I had worked on independently during my film study years.
I left experimental film because I found it too subliminal. Imagine sitting in a dark theater, where images are flashing at you (or gliding slowly along the screen) with their own strange coherence, which you have to try and decipher in your logical, real world. I felt that this was impossible, since the real intent of many of these filmmakers is to put the viewer into a kind of unthinking, primal trance, and to make him free associate the images to produce some other, unreal (art?) world. We were being manipulated, and after I learned the craft, I understood, in a very rudimentary way, how these manipulations can occur. For example flashing an image in a barely perceptible single frame, completely (apparently) unrelated to the rest of the footage, can induce the viewer to conclude "something else."
Monday's program brought another perspective to my understanding of such films.The program's title was Coming Attractions, and it was the sixth, and last, in the series of these Wavelength films. Here is the synopsis of the title film Coming Attractions:
Peter Tscherkassky's Coming Attractions is a sly, sartorial comedy that masterfully mines the relationship between early cinema and the avant-garde by way of fifties-era advertising. With references to Méliès, Lumières, Cocteau, Léger, Chomette and Persil laundry detergent, the film explores cinema’s subliminal possibilities using an impressive arsenal of techniques, like solarization, optical printing and multiple exposures.Cinema's subliminal possibilities using an impressive arsenal of techniques? I was right after all!
The film was in a sense an homage to those greats in experimental film (or avant-garde film as it was known at the birth of this type of film making) - Méliès, Lumières, Léger, who really did experiment with the camera, the film and their subject matter. They were trying to understand and invent a new art form. Their mission seemed as much scientific as artistic. And they were trying to make film as prestigious and respected as painting (or any of the other fine arts). If there is any analogy to literature, they tried to recreate film as poetry, rather than the novel - which they derogatorily considered the domain of "narrative" films, which is what our film world is filled with now.
But, we are past one hundred years when this experiment started. Rather than put their kinds of film on par with painting (perhaps their scientific endeavors have borne fruit since film making has left the celluloid and progressed to digital), this small program revealed to me that the final, and logical squaring of the circle occurred with Austrian filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky's Coming Attractions. The subliminal avant-garde provided an aggressive "arsenal of techniques" for advertising. How far removed from art can this be!
So, it was disappointing, and in many way redemptive (I left the discipline, after all) to find that this new millennium (countering the past millennium and the birth of film), might be ushering in the death of film - or the experimental trials (in search of art) that those avant-gardists were attempting. And Coming Attractions is the best that the contemporary avant-garde filmmaker can make - imitate those techniques to send subliminal messages to make us buy things we don't really want or need, rather than contemplate and be nourished by art. But, I have another, harsher, theory, which I will expound on in the future. These early 20th century avant-garde filmmakers had already planted the seeds for the demise of art and that experimental film was doomed from the beginning. Since a great part of its mission is to regress us (the viewers) to a primeval state, when we cannot attentively contemplate art and beauty, but are led to passively react to the images.
But, having said all this, there is a charm and beauty to some of these films. Perhaps the strategy is to watch them in small doses, once a year at a film festival. Still, flickers of light and color in magical shapes in a darkened theater may pull us into a netherworld, but we had better find a way to enter our own, real one once out of that modern camera obsucra.
