Michael Snow

  • Michael Snow – ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974)

    Michael Snow1971-1980ArthouseCanadaExperimental
    'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) (1974)
    ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) (1974)

    Synopsis
    Consisting of 25 sections, each segment is a meditation–often comic–about the nature of recorded sound, both abstract and representational, about the many possible kinds of audiovisual relationships, and about their philosophical implications.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – La région centrale (1971) (HD)

    1971-1980CanadaExperimentalMichael Snow

    Quote:
    «La Région Centrale» was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Back and Forth AKA <—> (1969)

    1961-1970CanadaExperimentalMichael Snow

    Quote:
    “This neat, finely tuned, hypersensitive film examines the outside and inside of a banal prefab classroom, stares at an asymmetrical space so undistinguished that it’s hard to believe the whole movie is confined to it, and has this neck-jerking camera gimmick that hits a wooden stop arm at each end of its swing. Basically it’s a perpetual motion film that ingeniously builds a sculptural effect by insisting on time-motion to the point where the camera’s swinging arcs and white wall field assume the hardness, the dimensions of a concrete beam. “In such a hard, drilling work, the wooden clap sounds are a terrific invention, and, as much as any single element, create the sculpture. Seeming to thrust the image outward off the screen, these clap effects are timed like a metronome, sometimes occurring with torrential frequency.” – Manny Farber, Artforum, 1970Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Presents (1981)

    1981-1990CanadaExperimentalMichael Snow

    The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a ‘real’ unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material ‘investigations’ of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life’s irreversible disappearance.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Cityscape (2019)

    Michael Snow2011-2020CanadaExperimental

    Quote:
    Cityscape elaborates on the methods Snow used in the making of his ground-breaking 360-degree film La Région Centrale (1971). Taking the advice of his long-time friend, Graeme Ferguson, to produce it as an Imax film, Snow orchestrates new patterns of movement that exchanges the focus on landscape in La Région Centrale with the cityscape of Toronto.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Puccini conservato (2008)

    Michael Snow2001-2010CanadaExperimentalShort Film

    Puccini Conservato was commissioned by the Lucca Film Festival for the 150th anniversary of the famous Italian composer’s birth. In this delightful video, the Canadian master offers a witty visual and sonic commentary to Puccini’s La Bohème.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – New York Eye and Ear Control (1964)

    1961-1970CanadaExperimentalMichael SnowShort Film

    This film contains illusions of distances, durations, degrees, divisions of antipathies, polarities, likenesses, complements, desires. Acceleration of absence to presence. Scales of Art – Lift, setting-subject, mind body, country city pivot. Simultaneous silence and sound, one and all. Arc of excitement, night and daylight. Aide. side then back then front. Imagined and Real. Gradual, racial, philosophical kiss.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Standard Time (1967)

    1961-1970CanadaExperimentalMichael SnowShort Film

    Standard Time is 8 minutes and feels, hypnotically, like a time-less segment fragment of life.(Life-physical movement in a space/time enclosure). The camera swivels (pans) left to right, over and over again, then tilts, up and down, over and over again establishing movement as such as the given conditions of perception and existence. This suspended tension of being holds for both the cameraman and the spaces/walls/objects/(people?)…The film establishes each viewer’s autonomous sense of self. The bombarding impulses, through the ‘repeated’ pans/tilts, permit (for each viewer, each time) different moments of reality to become relevant, exciting etc. The speed at which the camera sees the given visually creates frustration at not being able to hold (the) experience, to pattern it in a conventional manner. Michael Snow’s film activates one’s internal mechanisms for grasping, (idiosyncratically, in time), the substances one is faced with, a negates objective experience once and for all. In terms of the politics of experience and human consciousness, few films could be less fascist. Standard Time is also a beautiful ‘8’ minutes. – Peter Gidal.Read More »

  • Michael Snow – Wavelength (1967) (HD)

    1961-1970Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive ArtCanadaClassicsExperimentalMichael Snow

    Quote:
    “Wavelength” was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May, 1967. (The Film-Makers’ Cooperative)

    Quote:
    I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing.Read More »

Back to top button