Wavelength: On the Profound Grief of Losing a Shared Language

Chances are you have come across Holly Warburton’s work if you spend time on Pinterest or Tumblr. There is a very specific quality to her art, an authenticity to the people and gestures she draws, and a feeling close to anguish but perhaps better described as a keen awareness of seeing and experiencing something that exists for that evening or that moment alone.

She brings that to narrative with Wavelength, a queer romance encapsulating the feeling of never before and never quite again. With an Impressionistic style, Warburton builds the ephemerality and transcendence of a connection whose rarity engenders grief from the moment it sparks into existence. Produced by Kate Auster and written by Benjamin Verrall, the four-minute film flows with a sense of intense subjectivity.

There are no diegetic dialogues. Instead it is narrated in lyrical voiceover by Lily Manning. The strings based score is melancholic, becoming plaintive as the film draws to a close. It is a recollection of a thing past and an accounting of its echoes in the present. The beloved who was a stranger became the window to a new world, and together they developed a shared language, a frequency only the two of them could tune into. And the loss of which left an outline around the absence, the language dying for want of use.

The origin—meeting in a train—has clung to the protagonist’s perception of the relationship. She sees it pass through the frame of that indelible window, the experience so moving that it feels severed from reality, from herself, even. And when it is over, what is left for the window to do but to fade away out of sight with the train?

The story is acutely suited to cinema, particularly animation. The plasticity of animation complements the changeability of memory in a way little else can. The heartbreak in Wavelength becomes the heartbreak of Wavelength as we understand and share in the experience of a character who does not have a name, often does not have a distinct face. The impression of everything reverberates with the woman’s quiet, tenacious labour to sustain what remains: memory.

Watch Wavelength Short Film Trailer