Today on the 5: After watching a movie that was in many ways a paint by numbers production, I went in the completely opposite direction by watching 1967's Wavelength. Described by some as the most experimental film ever made, it's a unique experience that kind of warped my brain a bit while I watched it.
Ozone Nightmare
Wavelength Retro Review
Welcome to daily five for Wednesday, August 14th, 2024. Well, if you found that Last Breath sounded way too pedestrian and commonplace a mainstream for you, then I have the exact opposite film for you to review today. And it is 1967's wavelength, which has been described and you can make the argument as the most unconventional and experimental film ever made. Now I don't know that I would necessarily agree with that, but I can certainly understand where the sentiment comes from because let me tell you what this film is. It's a Canadian film that is, and I'm not exaggerating here, the entirety of the film is it is a locked down camera shot of a nearly empty apartment somewhere in Canada, where over the course of 45 minutes the camera continually zooms in until a picture on the opposite end of the room fills the frame, and that picture is of ocean waves. And that's it. That's what the movie is. Now, there are a couple of things that happened during it, but by and large, that's all it is. It's a slowly zooming in shot of this room that was done over the course of a week. Now there's tampering with the film. There is some interesting ambient soundtrack manipulation that happens. There are some people that come in and out of the frame at times, although many of them seem unrelated, and if there is a narrative with them, it is so minimal it might as well not exist. There are some use of sound effects here and there, which may or may not be related to some of the people that come into the frame. Many people think those sound effects are, I'm skeptical, but there's some changing of the time of day. But that's really all this is. It really just is a camera shot that's continually zooming in until it gets to the picture, filling the frame, and then the movie just stops, or this movie goes into a heavy blur, goes to white and stops. I'm not even really spoiling it because there's nothing to spoil. And so it really is an experience. It is something where, and 97% of anybody who'd ever watched this will never make it to the end. I'm fairly confident of that, especially if they know what it is going in. But even if they don't, at some point I would imagine, for example, my wife, I told my wife nothing about this, and I said, "Here, let's watch this." And we started watching that within five minutes, I'm pretty sure she would say to me, "Is anything going to happen in this movie?" And when I would say, "No," she would say, "I'm not going to watch this anymore," and I would understand why. This is absolutely for people who are into experimental or avant-garde film. I found it really fascinating because at times, and I knew it was 45 minutes, I knew exactly what it was. I didn't read every single detail of it, not that it really matters, because the details are so minor, it's not important. But I knew it was 45 minutes of a zooming in shot, and that it was an experimental film, and that was it. And I knew how long it was. And even knowing all of that, at times the movies seemed to slow down and speed up, even though I was kind of keeping track of the time. There were parts where it seemed to be moving in different ways than I knew that it was, because it's just the same image more or less the whole way. My mind started playing tricks on me. I started to think I was seeing things in the frame that I'm pretty sure I wasn't, although I might have been, because there is a heavy amount of tampering with the film. It is not just an unbroken shot. There's parts where the image is inverted, it gets polarized, there's all this heavy exposure being done, there's color washing being done. All kinds of different things, a manipulation of the film, that I think are meant to make you start to wonder if you're seeing what you think you're seeing. And I found it really compelling. It's almost a meditation film. If you were to watch it with the sound muted, I could see this being a way that people would meditate, to some degree. I could see it as a centering exercise for some people. It just exists as a really interesting, weird example of almost performance art. I mean, this is avant garde film, because most people will write this off as a tremendous waste of time. And I can't tell them that they're wrong, because nothing really does happen. When people talk about movies where nothing happens, this is the literal expression of that phrasing. However, I would say if you're into experimental film, you can find it everywhere for free. I would say watch it and watch it without distraction. I made a point to not look at my phone, nothing. I just watched the movie beginning to end. And I think that's how I would recommend watching it. There is something to that experience that a small portion of people will get. So again, it's from 1967. It's called wavelength, and it's different, but it is interesting later.