Michel Chion and Michael Snow's Wavelength

Watch the digital version of the film here.

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (Ontario, 1967, 45 min.) has been reviewed and gone under different criticisms, since its production. But critics and theorists have not invested enough attention in analyzing the film through its sonic values. Therefore in this essay, Michel Chion as one of the main figures in cinema theory, who has investigated sound thoroughly, is taken into consideration, and his theories regarding sound and its relation to image have been carefully examined on the way sound operates in Wavelength: the way in which sound adds a value to the image, how it influences the perception of movement and time, how sound functions when it is removed from its source, and finally how different senses transcend the typical sensory system and produce a transsensorial effect.

One of the most vital and perhaps essential films in the history of experimental cinema is Michael Snow’s Wavelength. Screenings of the film have resulted in diverse reactions and experiences, and have triggered more mixed emotions –frustration, boredom, excitement, anxiety and awe– in different audiences than perhaps any other film. It definitely challenges traditional viewing habits, and raises questions and notions on both formal and thematic levels. Louis Goyette describes Wavelength as “a summery of art history which condenses the evolution of painting from the renaissance to the contemporary period, all the while maintaining qualities intrinsic to cinematographic apparatus.”

The film begins with a long shot of a fairly large room, shot with a deep depth of field. The lighting of the room is mainly provided by the natural light, entering through four large rectangular windows, which are at the end of the room, facing the camera. There are also a few florescent lights on the ceiling, which become more effective, in the night shots. The entrance to the room is out of the camera’s framing, but from the flow of characters it can be guessed being somewhere behind the camera on the left.

During the course of forty-five minuets of the film, an extremely gradual zoom-in and in parts track-in takes place. As mentioned, the film begins with a long shot of the room, and then ends with a close-up shot of a photograph on the wall, between the windows, depicting water waves. In addition to this camera movement, there are also textural changes that occur, including subtle and radical changes of color and exposure. There are also black & white shots, different variations of film stock, light flares, day to night changes, visible splices, and negative images.

In wavelength there exists a fine line of narrative as well. This narrative, which is short, comparatively to the length of the film, is kept somewhat abstract, and in parts partially out of frame. There are four human linked events in the film: 1) entrance of a woman followed by two man bringing in a bookcase. 2) Entrance of two women, where one turns a radio on and then off, and the other shuts the window. 3) Entrance of a man, who shortly after falls on the floor. 4) Entrance of a woman who makes a phone call to report the fallen man. The narrative events trigger a shift in the perception of the piece, which is strong and complex on the formal and structural level as well. The audience’s concentration is shifted by these four events, from a formal teleological interpretation of the zoom and the textural manipulations, to the narrative, and vice versa.

More than any other element, it is the sound that shapes the film and creates the necessary relation between the different formal, aesthetic, narrative and contextual factors. However, wavelength has been carelessly described by critics and theorists as a continuous gradual zoom taken from a fixed camera, overlooking the film’s sonic qualities and its effect in the overall experience. In a letter to Peter Gidal on the subject of Back and Forth (1968- 1969), Snow himself did express his frustration with the lack of attention to his employment of sound: “Now as you say seeing the film is a very physical experience. (I can’t understand why you didn’t also say hearing it because the sound, its qualities, relationship to the image, effect, are so important to the whole thing.”

The film begins with the diegetic sound of the location, which is mainly the ambient noise of the traffic outside. Sometimes in parts where the narrative events occur we also get the synchronized sound of dialogues. But the main sound that constitutes most of the film is a sine wave, which begins at around ten minuets through the film. The sine wave starts at a low frequency of 50 Hz and gradually during the course of the film increases its pitch to 12 kHz.
In Audio-Vision Michel Chion introduces the notion of added value¬– an audiovisual illusion in the heart of the most important relationships between sound and image. Chion describes added value as:
…The expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression naturally comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself.
The affective influence of sound on image, and the unconscious impression that it leaves on the perception of the motion pictures, acts in two contexts of value added by ‘text’, and the value added by music, as Chion mentions later.

Chion describes cinema as a vococentric or more precisely verbocenteric medium. By this he emphasizes the importance of value added by text, through the spoken voice, or to be more general, language, in cinema. The added value of words can be understood by the way they frame our vision and isolate elements in image. In Wavelength the sound operates on the semiotic level, in two distinct ways, affecting our perception of the visual images. The first and the more apparent one is in the scenes where there are human involvements and we get diegetic sound of spoken words. Those sounds automatically direct our attention towards the presence of the humans, and isolate them from other visual elements in the screen. Now we can argue that this isolation of attention is due to the fact that during most of the film we are viewing an empty room without any human interaction. However in the mentioned events the visuals portraying humans are vague and abstract: characters are visually framed in the dark spots, sometimes partially out of frame, and sometimes under layers of superimpositions. Therefore it can be said that visuals do very little in the process of isolation of attention.
The second and more indirect way in which the sound operates semiotically in adding a value to the image is through the use of a dynamic sine wave. It is quite evident how Snow has used the sine wave as a mean to signify how the film ends. The sine wave which is present almost throughout the film, gains a strong conceptual weight at the end, by the way it highlights the photograph depicting water waves. Here, Snow has played with words and drawn a relation between the image and sound. The sound indirectly by its linguistic qualities adds a value to the image and isolates an element, a photograph– a visual complexity itself.

According to Chion, another way in which sound adds a value to the image is how the sound influences the perception of movement and perception of speed. Chion distinguishes visual and auditory perception referring to their different relationship to motion and stasis. Quoting Chion: “Sound contrary to sight, presupposes movement from the outset. …But sound by its very nature necessarily implies a displacement or agitation, however minimal.” Therefore sound by its very nature has vibrant qualities. However if we avoid physical interpretations of sound and only focus on it perceptive nature, it can be suggested that “fixed sound” is that which entails no variations whatsoever as it is heard. A perfect example of such fixed sound would be a sine wave. Thus the sound that Snow has used in Wavelength is from a “fixed” nature, nevertheless by varying its pitch, and giving it a temporality, Snow has mobilized such sound. Again relating it to the metaphor of wave, it is possible to draw a similarity between water and the sine wave. Water is also by its nature static, but it becomes mobile when it is part of an ocean wave.

Sound can also influence our perception of movement in another manner. It can suggest a movement that is not visually there. A perfect example for this effect, used by Chion, is the sound effect used for the swishy automatic doors in Star Wars saga (Irving Kreshner, 1980), a dynamic pneumatic “shhh” sound. The sound was in fact so convincing that at times the director Irving Kershner, took a static shot of the open door and followed it by a shot of it closed, yet the sound effect which is synced to this cut, gives the spectator an illusion of the movement that is not visually there. In Wavelength, perhaps the ambient sound of the outside traffic suggests such movement, a movement that is not visually there. We never get to see the outside clearly, however because of the diegetic sound of the environment the same kind of infinite temporality that the film has is reflected spatially beyond the windows. Staying in that confined room for nearly forty-five minuets, the sound creates a spatial contrast with the exterior of that location.

This brings us to one of the key notions that Murray Schaeffer has coined, and that is the ‘acousmatic’. Chion defines acousmatic as: “a sound that is heard without its cause or source being seen.” He uses the term acousmatic since he believes both terms, offscreen and non-diegetic, are ambiguous and generally referred to cinema sound. Now the interesting point is that, the acousmatic quality of a sound can only be understood, with its relation to image. In other words, a sound solely by itself has no acousmatic qualities unless it is related to an image, and not necessary an image on the cinema screen. In Wavelength, both non-diegetic sine wave and the diegetic sound of the exterior traffic, have acousmatic qualities. The first one is too abstract to be assigned to any source and the second one’s sources are simply not visible on the screen.

Later in the book The Voice in Cinema, Chion explains two processes of acousmatization and de-acousmatization. acousmatization happens when an image of a sound is removed from it, and vice versa de-acousmatization is when a sound without any image, is given a visual signifier later on. A clear example for de-acousmatization would be when a characters voice is heard offscreen, and s/he enters the frame later. His/her voice is said to be de-acousmatized. Chion assigns a power to acousmatic sounds, a ‘virginity’ derived from the simple fact that its source is not yet inscribed in the visual field. It both challenges the imagination and triggers an excitement for the sound to be known. However as soon as a sound is de-acousmatized, it loses its virginal-acousmatic powers, and becomes a typical image-sound. Snow is very well aware of this power, and he refuses to expose us to the sources of most of sounds in Wavelength. He defines an infinite world outside those windows in that finite space, and creates a metaphor between the sine wave and the waves in the photograph, yet he preserves the acousmatic powers of the sounds and does not reveal their sources.

One of the most important effects of added value is the perception of the time in the image, upon which sound imposes a great influence. Chion uses the term Temporalization for this effect’s process. He then describes ways in which sound can temporalize image: the first is temporal animation of image. Quoting Chion: “ to varying degrees, sound renders the perception of time in the image as exact, detailed, immediate, concrete– or vague, fluctuating, broad.” In Wavelength, even though there are visible cuts, and a cut from day to night, the film gives the impression of being real-time. Chion later on the subject of Temporal Linearization explains:
When a sequence of images does not necessarily show temporal succession in the action it depicts the addition of realistic, diegetic sound imposes on the sequence a sense of real time, and above all, a sense of time that is linear and sequential.
Snow provides the viewer the diegetic sound of the environment, which acts in that accordance, and on top of that the sine wave, even though it is non-diegetic, mainly due to its non-fluctuating quality, linearizes the temporal experience of the image, and gives the image a sense of being in real-time.

The other way in which sound temporalizes image is, according to Chion: “ by vectorizing or dramatizing shots, orienting them toward a future, a goal, and creation of a feeling of imminence and expectation.” In the case of Wavelength, the gradual ascent in the pitch of the sine wave builds up this expectation in the audience. Knowing that this sound is not going to go any higher than a certain pitch, the spectator can vaguely visualize the time when the film is suppose to end. Perhaps a similar feeling to that of viewing a feature length film, where being trained by watching approximately 90 to 120 minuets films, from the beginning of the film we have a quite blurred temporal idea of when the film is going to end.

Chion also analyses the relation between temporalization and sound’s basic qualities such as density, internal texture, tone, quality, and progression. He then names different factors that come to play:
1. How sound is sustained. Chion explains that a smooth and continuous sound is less “animating” than an uneven or fluttering one. At a first glance a sine wave may seem a continuous non-fluctuating sound, but we see that in Wavelength, it perfectly animates the images that are in most parts very difficult to connect with each other. A close hearing of a sine wave will show us, despite our first intake of it, that in fact it is constituted of small cycles of oscillation that occur in the sound. With regards to psychoacoustics, this characteristic of sine wave creates a more tense and immediate focusing of attention on the image.

2. Sound definition. Chion explains that higher frequencies tend to direct perception of the image more acutely, and makes the spectator more alert. This justifies Snow’s gradual tendency towards the high frequency of sine wave, near the end of the film. By the sine wave, he slowly builds up the right tension, and focuses enough attention to expose the photograph.

3. How predictable the sound is as it progresses. As explained earlier, Snow provides the viewers of Wavelength with a sense of time for the film. Considering the threshold of human hearing which is no higher than 20 kHz and the pace of the pitch ascend of the sine wave, the spectator indirectly calculates the film duration and is unconsciously aware. However as the film ends on 12 kHz frequency, Snow conflict that subconscious calculations.

Another key concept that Chion highlights and can be studied in relation to works of Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage, is the notion of transsensoriality. For Chion transsensoriality is that “there is no sensory given that is demarcated and isolated from the outset. Rather the senses are channels, highways more than territories or domains.” He uses the example of rhythm, which is usually thought of as a sonic quality, and generalizes it to other senses:
A rhythmic phenomenon reaches us via a given sensory path– this path, eye or ear, is perhaps nothing more than the channel through which rhythm reaches us. Once it has entered the ear or eye, the phenomenon strikes us in some region of the brain connected to the motor functions and it solely at this level that it is decoded as rhythm.

That is to consider for instance sound and music need not to be confined to the realm of hearing. Brakhage’s silent legacy is perhaps an attempt to produce music with images. He reminds us that because we perceive images with our eyes, we should not necessary draw the conclusion that we can experience it only as visual information. Brakhage states in Film and Music: “I seek to hear color just as Messiaen seeks to see sound.” In Wavelength, transsensoriality is evident in both directions. While the image provide us with a rhythm and musical sensation, the sine wave and the offscreen sounds illustrates an image for our mind; an image of spatial eternity beyond the windows, and at the same time a sensation of temporality.

As it is illustrated above through Chion’s different notions of sound and its relation to image, the sound in Wavelength, operates at different levels, and plays a significant role in contributing to the experience that this film leaves on its spectator, after forty-five minuets of patient viewing. It adds a value on both semiotic and sonic levels to the image, it influences the perception of the movements, and gives a unique temporal quality to the film that is certainly one of the most effective parts of the whole experience. The film presents us with sounds whose sources are never exposed, thereby creating a powerful tension that never goes away. The visual and sonic qualities of this film certainly cross their own sensory organs and create a transsensoriality, a phenomenon that connects them, and creates a powerful film.