Wavelength is anything but simple, however, as Snow’s statement of intention suggests. He describes the film as “a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas.” The spine of the film is its famous zoom from a fixed camera position facing a wall with four tall sash windows. Over the course of the film, the angle of view narrows until the frame is filled with a black and white photograph of waves pinned up between the middle two windows. Other features of the room, in which four events involving people take place, are sloughed off. The spectator is led to concentrate on this central element, the photograph—it has been there all along—until the image is washed out and the film comes to an end.
Tag: 1960s
A short film documenting what was referred to as “The International Poetry Incarnation”. It was billed as Great Britain’s first full-scale “happening”, with the world’s leading Beat poets together under one roof at the Royal Albert Hall on June 11, 1965, for an evening of near-hallucinatory revelry. It came to be seen as one of the cultural high points of the Swinging Sixties.
Robert Breer’s extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen’s 1964 premiere of Originale.
When the atheistic ranting of Irish-American author James Mulcahy upsets the inhabitants of the Irish village to which he has retired, a mob threatens him. But moments after he has dared God to strike him dead, a stranger appears and does so. The man, dubbed “Johnny Nobody” by the press, claims no knowledge of Mulcahy or even of himself. He asks the help of the village priest, Father Carey, in his upcoming trial for Mulcahy’s murder. While the amnesiac Johnny goes to trial, Father Carey mulls questions of belief raised by the case. And then, the good father learns a little more about Johnny Nobody…
After the death of his father, 17-year-old Nino is finding adolescence a traumatic and lonely ordeal. One autumn, during a holiday on the slopes of Mount Etna, he finds he is strongly attracted towards his young aunt, Cettina. Although married, she has no children of her own and his interest in her awakens her maternal instincts. An intimacy develops between them and his liking for her turns into an all-consuming desire. When he discovers that she is pursuing a secret affair with another man, Sasa, he is overwhelmed by jealousy and fails to comprehend her infidelity.
Tai Katô’s highly stylised & often-seedy tale of revenge is definitely not for the faint hearted! Five women sexually molest a 16-year-old delivery boy & drive him to suicide. Like Oshima’s Violence at Noon & Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine, this legendary exploitation film portrays the disturbing anatomy of a serial killer. Stars Makoto Satô as the revenge-driven killer who sets out to avenge his friend’s suicide by appointing himself judge, jury & executioner.
“Bump City is a colour film about the symbolic destruction of Los Angeles. It was never a very finished film, but it was about signs and advertising, redundant communications and manufacturing, waste and monotony.” —Pat O’Neill.
Never released in America, Petri’s second feature displays the same evocative mix of realism and symbolism found in THE LADY KILLER OF ROME. The film stars Salvo Randone as Cesare, a lonely Roman plumber in his early fifties. Traveling by tram one day, he witnesses the sudden death, by heart attack, of a man his own age. The event shocks him into the realization that his own days might be numbered, and he becomes determined to make the most of the time he has left. Quitting his job, he sets out with enthusiasm to enjoy the finer things in life, but the effort only leaves him dispirited and disillusioned.