A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

and their other films because I liked the freedom of it and the fact that George and Mike just went ahead and

did

it. It's wonderful, but it wasn't my kind of thing. I think it really opened up things for Joyce. She didn't imitate them, but she had a kinship with their work. I don't know whether you've seen any of her 8mm films, but they're really terrific. I don't know what's happened to them. She was going to get some blown up, but I don't know whether she ever did. When I was starting the first attempt at

Eye and Ear Control,

she was already shooting in 8mm.

MacDonald:

Where does

Short Shave

[1965] fit into all this?

Snow:

I did it before

Wavelength,

and after

Eye and Ear Control

.

MacDonald:

It's a nice film.

Snow:

You like it? I think you know I said in the Co-op Catalogue that it was my worst film. I saw it recently and I think it's good, too. I had worked with the Walking Woman concept from 1961 to 1967. I still had ideas for it, but I decided that it had to stop. And making that film, shaving that beard off, was part of trying to make the change. Actually, I had a big commission, the first I ever hadfor Expo '67 in Montreal. And I decided that would be a nice way to end

The Walking Woman Works

. The Expo '67 piece grew out of the dispersed things that I'd done before, but this was more monumental, in stainless steel. There were eleven parts scattered all over the Expo area. They fit together, perhaps, in your memory; they couldn't all be seen together. So anyway, that was the last of

The Walking Woman Works,

except for her bow-out in

Wave

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length,

which was shot in the same year: 1966, I finished it in January 1967.

MacDonald:

Her appearance in

Wavelength

reminds me of Koko the Clown's appearances in some early Betty Boop cartoons: he's a star in the silent Fleischer Brothers' animations, but in the early Betty Boop sound cartoons, he becomes a bit player and moves into the background.

Wavelength

has become a crucial film in people's writing about the history of avant-garde work. And yet, by the time you made it, you'd done a lot of work of a lot of different kinds, much of which is related to it. When you were making

Wavelength,

did it seem to you that it was pivotal, or was it just another of many comparable moments in your work?

Snow:

It was very important to me. I spent a year thinking about it and making notes before I started shooting. I've always oscillated between an incredible lack of confidence and conceit. I was going through a stage where, as usual, I was trying to clarify myself and get rid of some of what I had been doing before. I was trying to make something that would benefit from what I'd done, but to work

in time

in a new way. What came to be

Wavelength

did feel like some sort of do-or-die thing. That's the kind of mood I was in. I wanted to prove something to myself.

Wavelength

was an attempt to concentrate a lot of stuff in one piece. I had come to feel that some of

The Walking Woman Works

had stretched. Individual works were strong, but others were just part of the series; if you didn't see the series, they didn't have strength in themselves. I wanted

Wavelength

to be very strong.

I don't know where the money came from because those years were pretty poor. But everybody else involved in the film scene, which was really tiny then, was scraping together a couple of cents to do a film. So I felt I could do it, too.

MacDonald:

The idea of concentrating is interesting because a lot of the earlier work disperses outward.

Wavelength

is literally a narrowing in.

Snow:

Precisely. You start with a wide field and move into this specific point.

MacDonald:

How much did you envision the film in terms of its impact on an audience?

Snow:

At that time, I didn't think there was an audience other than at the Cinematheque. When

Wavelength