Wavelength (1967) is an
experimental film by
filmmaker Michael Snow.
This 45 minute long, 16 mm color film is centered around a single shot in a room; one long zoom narrowing the frame from the entire room to a photograph of the ocean on a far wall.
In the duration, a few events occur. People come into the room and turn on and off a radio (Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles is playing). Filmic techniques such as filtering and inverting of the image are used. Towards the end, a man walks in and apparantly dies. Later, a woman comes in and finds the dead man and calls someone on the phone to share the news.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack (in addition to the diegetic sounds) consists of a sine wave slowly rising from a low frequency to a high frequency (or long wavelength to short wavelength). This sound was apparantly made with a cheap synthesizer, because throughout the film, one can hear the difference tones created with the 60 Hz line frequency. These difference tones, though add an interesting dimension to the soundtrack.
Aesthetically, Wavelength is closely related to the contemporaneous formalist/minimalist music of Steve Reich and James Tenney. Its strict formalism is somewhat violated by the seemingly intuitive or arbitrary hints of narrative and visual effects, but in the end, the all-encompassing structure sets aside minor inconsistencies and stands on its own as a classic.