Wavelength (1967 film)

Wavelength is a 1967 experimental film by Canadian artist Michael Snow. Shot from a fixed camera angle, it depicts a loft space with an extended zoom over the duration of the film.

Snow filmed Wavelength in December 1966 over the course of a week, casting friends of his to appear in the film's brief narrative events. He experimented with mixed film stocks and other techniques that produce changes in the image's appearance. The film's soundtrack combines synchronized sound with sinusoidal output from an audio oscillator, which increases in pitch until the end of the film.

Wavelength won the Grand Prix at the 1967 Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Belgium. Critic P. Adams Sitney identified it as a touchstone within the structural film movement, and Scott MacDonald has recognized as a landmark of avant-garde cinema. Snow went on to create a trilogy of "camera motion" films, which included the later films <---> (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971), and Wavelength inspired several of his other works.