april 7th: Reds + Michael Snow

hello friends,

reds (1981) had very little staying power in my head beyond diane keaton looking so swagged out the whole film. lots of yelling! loren, helli and i dnf'd it at the theater so i watched the rest at home today. i honestly enjoyed the first half but it was a great film to pull the cord on; watching the post-intermission half today was not rewarding.

i feel like my history with michael snow dates back like 15 years despite my never having seen any of his work. he is kind of a quintessential "guy you find out about when you're randomly searching for ~weird~ artists" guy (like schoenberg, cage, roden, you get the idea). the impetus for new york eye + ear control (1964) is maybe the most i've ever identified with a filmmaker; snow had seen the albert ayler quartet and thought they went so crazy that he pursued + used a "film employing jazz" grant from ten centuries concerts so he could "buy a half hour of music" from ayler + co. i listened to the soundtrack album while opening the shop maybe a month ago, and knew i'd have to circle around for the film.

on the whole, i do think nye+ec was a more successful record than film (it's not lost on me that the record has its own wiki page and the film does not). for what i had read of snow (and confirmed later that night), i sort of expected a more structural, methodical approach here. the progression of silhouettes just felt a little loose, i guess? things started to tighten up around 10 minutes (or, what felt like 10 minutes in my head) when we started to get clearer held frames. i almost feel like what im about to say is a spoiler for this 62 year old free jazz music video, but the introduction of real deal people kind of had me pointing at the screen going woooooahhhhhh yeeahhhhhhhhhhhhhh. im curious how some of the last ~5 minutes would do in a proper theater instead of my home, they're so dark as to be disorienting in a home setup. an interesting, but not wholly gripping, set of images set to just a sicko mode record. free jazz forever <3

wavelength (1967), our entree (or main, for euro readers), was my introduction to snow from aforementioned wiki dives, as its a concept that translates as "weird" very easily if you write about it ("that movie where it's just a camera zooming in for 45 minutes"). in some ways, it was what i was expecting - you find a lot of time in the first 5 minutes to notice light fixtures. i think the quaker superpower is watching this and going "i wish he would take a little more time on some things", but its a misnomer to treat wavelength as some sort of treatise on patience or slowness. snow is presenting us a single mise and getting to work on how this image can be captured with a bolex, some weird gels and some weird film stocks. this gives us some really aggressive "cuts" that really pull this film into pure formal experimentation. this ain't consonant drone it's noise! (the scoring on this is beautiful, and a (at the time) formal experiment worthy of accompanying the film's experiment. it would've been so easy to set this to nostalgic piano music but snow had some sense about him).

i found myself moved by the gradual zoom in a way i wasn't expecting. about 6 minutes in i realized that i would have to, at some point in the movie, say goodbye to my chosen protagonist of the film, the yellow chair. any dalliance with weird frame exposure or filters could not save me from this departure. no amount of plot (there is a plot!) could save me from this departure. when i spilled tea on myself and had to change in the middle of the film? couldnt save me. and so we waited, and said our goodbye, knowing that the chair was still there and i just didn't get to see it anymore. and i got to see some waves on a picture instead. i like rose lowder's waves more, but these were pretty good too.