ABSTRACT
A different sort of SoHo, and SoHo art, appears inMichael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), which is in many ways the classic representation of early SoHo. For forty-five minutes, a stationary camera zooms down a long narrow space 80 feet long to several large windows overlooking a street, incidentally revealing unfinished walls and a rickety floor. Fairly early in the film, a young woman supervises the moving of a bookcase into the space. Leaving temporarily, she returns with another young woman; together they listen to a radio. In P. Adams Sitney’s summary, “Midway through, a man breaks glass (heard off-screen) through an unseen door and climbs the stairs (so we hear); he enters the studio and collapses on the floor, but the lens has already crossed half the room, and he is only glimpsed; the image passes over him. Late in the film, a girl returns, goes to the telephone, which, being at the far wall, is in full view, and in a dramatic moment which brings the previous events of the film into a narrative nexus, calls a man, ‘Richard,’ to tell him there is a dead body in the room. She insists that the man does not look drunk, but dead, and she says she will wait downstairs. She leaves.” Plot continues to be minimal, though the representation is rich.
