With his film Wavelength, Michael Snow revolutionized the international avant-garde film scene. Viewed from its basic concept, this is a purely formal film: it consists of a single, 45-minute-long tracking shot through the length of a room, accompanied by slowly increasing sine tones. As the camera moves forward through the room’s space (when carefully studied the movement is not continuous, but made up of individual passages edited together), one registers the passing of several nights and days. The camera is ultimately moving toward a spot between two windows at the back of the room, where a photograph on the wall shows the unsettled surface of the sea. In the end, the camera comes so close to it that only the waves fill the screen.

“Wavelength is without precedent in the purity of its confrontation with the essence of cinema: the relationships between illusion and fact, space and time, subject and object. It is the first post-Warhol, post-Minimal movie; one of the few films to engage those higher conceptual orders which occupy modern painting and sculpture. It has rightly been described as a ‘triumph of contemplative cinema.’”
— Gene Youngblood, L.A. Free Press, 1968

Screens with Breakfast (Michael Snow, 1976, Canada, 16mm, 15 min) “In Breakfast, the camera (behind an invisible plexiglass shield) dollies toward an untidy still life of breakfast items and slowly pushes the objects along the table until they tip over, tumble off, or are smashed against the wall at the far end of the table.”