Critics reviews

Snow is here tweaking the Bazinian distinction between "those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality." He recognizes reality as a category continually under negotiation, and an image as a tool for convincing us this isn't so. In Wavelength's process of destabilizing both image and reality, Snow reveals that the film frame is not an absolute, nor is it eternal. It is an arbitrary construction.

Walking women" were an ongoing graphic concern of Snow, and as his movie approaches climax, the walking women of Wavelength are doubled once again, this time in the form of one of Snow's photographs, pinned to the loft's far wall. They are one potential but finally averted destination of Snow's visionary penetration, which ends instead in an arrested splash, the grains of the firmament sucked from beneath our feet by the film's duration, leaving us hanging ten on pure potentiality...

If Wavelength both contains and largely comprises what might be construed as the most consequential zoom shot in the history of cinema, this is because it radically redefines not only the functions that such a shot might have, but also –- and perhaps more importantly — the field of potential interest that almost any representational shot of any film _could_ have.

Voiding the film of the metaphoric proclivity of montage, Snow created a grand metaphor for narrative form. The consequences are still incalculable; Snow's example and influence, intensified through subsequent work, in film as in other media, acknowledged and unacknowledged, are among the strongest factors in a current situation of the most extraordinary interest.

The best quality is that the rigorous, high-level diary of a room is so itself, so unlike anything a moviegoer might imagine. Suddenly, with these exciting but soothingly balmy color-light variations in a worn interior, what had seemed a tabby-cat movement, the Underground film, takes on a profundity and sophistication, austere dignity and inventive wit of a major art. It is hard to believe that a film could be more taut or intelligent.