A cross-hatched family fantasy about nocturnal furniture love. Two chairs fuck.
1956, 16mm, color/si, 7m (18 fps ONLY), $20
"One of the major achievements of the sixties. Mike Snow postulates an eye that stares at surfaces with such intensity... The image itself seems to quiver, finally gives way under the pressure. A deceptive beginning - silent: a flat white form sharply cut to the silhouette of a walking woman... More Human images, love-making - a Human epic now still ruled by the after image of the "Walking Woman". As in no other film yet seen, its alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a 'placement' of consciousness - the subject matter of the future, really. Human energy on film..." Richard Foreman, New York Film Co-op
1964, 16mm, 34m, b&w/so, $105
Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Walking Woman. My worst film.
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
1967, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $30
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. 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. The space starts at the camera's (spectator's) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera >from one end of an 80 foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street .... The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by four human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine-wave .... It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to offer.
1966-1967, 16mm, color/so, 45m, $135
"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, 1970
1968-1969, 16mm, color/so, 53m, $135
"A collection of snow scenes, all still photographs of potential sites for a monument in Montreal (thus distinctly not 'artistic' photographs) follow, one another for 22 minutes." - P. Adams Sitney
"This serial procession of pictures is utterly fascinating and hypnotic in spite of the fact that the images themselves are quite ordinary. An overwhelming sense of mystery and deja vu is generated as the parade of odd bleak photographs moves by .... One is made to analyze and concentrate on the images far more attentively than one normally would. It becomes clear that Snow has forced an extremely intense subject-object relationship, not simply by the fact that he has held certain pictures longer than others, but because these durations are structured mathematically, are given a pattern and logic which seems purposive, that is, seems to move teleologically toward some 'meaning.' The only meaning, however, is one's relation to this temporal structure. Thus ONE SECOND IN MONTREAL becomes a sculpture which exists in time without motion. It is typical of Snow's genius, a gift best described by John Cage when he said: 'Where beauty ends is where the artist begins.'" - Gene Youngblood, ArtsCanada
1969, 16mm, b&w/si, 26m (16fps), $75
In 1970 I had a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. For this exhibition I composed/designed a largely photographic book called "A Survey." This was the first of several works which attempted to use previous work or the records of previous work as the material for new work. Starting with 'raw' material that has already been formed by oneself on some other occasions for some other purposes is a very interesting thing. SIDE SEAT....is a 20 minute sound film made in 1970 of the projecting and verbal (my voice) identification of slides (made at various times, by various people) of paintings in various media made by myself from 1955 to 1965. It is not autobiographical. The film is a recycling, a conversion which, by employing the illusion of temporal alteration which film and sound recording have made possible, becomes a completely new experience
1970, 16mm, color/so, 20m, $60
Shot in 1972 and shelved until 1976, when sound and editing problems were solved. All the varied and unusual motions visible on the screen are the result of a single camera movement.
"WAVELENGTH before breakfast. A continuous zoom traverses the space of a breakfast table, serving as a grand metaphor for indigestion." - Deke Dusinberre
1972-1976, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
"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' set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins... Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drumbeat that coincides with each edit announces each moment of life's irreversible disappearance." - Philip Monk, Art Express
"PRESENTS is a major work, even when measured by the standards of Snow's most impressive achievements. The title is a complex, provocatively ambiguous pun. The first section is a play based on the slipping and colliding senses of the word 'presents,' its homonyms, synonyms, and related concepts .... In the last section, assisted by the drum beat accenting each cut, the editing insists on the separateness of each shot and by doing so it constructs a vast inventory of different things and events. This extraordinary concluding montage sequence poses the most concerted and comprehensive challenge to the discourse of presen(ts)(ce) mounted by the film." - Stuart Liebman, Millennium Film Journal
1980-1981, 16mm, color/so, 90m, $135
"SO IS THIS parlays an elegantly simple concept into an unpredictable, cumulatively rich experience.
"The film is a text in which each shot is a single word, tightly-framed white letters against a black background. Compared to Snow's recent epics ... it seems almost a throwaway but it's also the most satisfying film he's made in a decade ....
"With formalist belligerence, SO IS THIS threatens to make its viewers 'laugh cry and change society,' even promising to get 'confessional.' Although the film does reflect Snow's personality - his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) - its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he's sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film's system of discourse to twit restless audiences... A lot of this is pretty funny but SO IS THIS is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years.
"If you let it, Snow's film stretches your definition of what film is - that's cinema and SO IS THIS." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1982, 16mm, b&w/si, 45m, $135
This film is in five reels and requires two identical projectors for continuous projection. Instructions are included for cueing from reel to reel.
"This new, three hour film by the Canadian Michael Snow is an extraordinary cinematic monument. No physical action, not even the presence of man, a fabulous game with nature and machine which puts into question our perceptions, our mental habits, and in many respects renders moribund existing cinema: the latest Fellini, Kubrick, Buñuel etc. For LA REGION CENTRALE, Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point of reference and permitting one to take hold of stable reality. Snow has chosen to film a deserted region, without the least trace of human life, 100 miles to the north of Sept-Isles in the province of Quebec: a sort of plateau without trees, opening onto a vast circular prospect of the surrounding mountains.
"In the first frames, the camera disengages itself slowly from the ground in a circular movement. Progressively, the space fragments, vision inverts in every sense, light everywhere dissolves appearance. We become insensible accomplices to a sort of cosmic movement. A sound track, rigorously synchronized, composed from the original sound which programmed the camera, supplies a permanent counterpoint.
"Michael Snow pushes toward the absurd the essential nature of this 'seventh' art which is endlessly repeated as being above the visual. He catapults us into the heart of a world before speech, before arbitrarily composed meanings, even subject. He forces us to rethink not only cinema, but our universe." - Louis Marcorelles, Le Monde
"Michael Snow's LA REGION CENTRALE can be described as heroic bordering on the apocalyptic. ... [I]t is an epochal film because of the extent of the camera movements and its transformation of space .... Gravity is destroyed ... the horizon line has been erased and forgotten and the land mass has been transformed into a whirling flat disc, a blurred flash of light with no mass or volume, rotating wildly through the sky
.... Snow's mountain landscape has become a reflection on the solar system." - Bill Simon, Artforum
"... an unimaginable film, literally like nothing you have ever seen before ...." - John W. Locke, Artforum
1971, 16mm, color/so, 180m, $210
"In SEATED FIGURES ... Michael Snow again explores the ground zero of motion pictures - this time literally. Most simply described, the film ... is a 40-minute consideration of a landscape from the perspective of an exhaust pipe. The artist appears to have bolted his camera, lens down, to a metal arm extending off the back of a truck ... then driven over asphalt and dirt roads, out to the beach, along a riverbed, and through a field of daisies. Although hypnotic, the movement is not continuous. The vehicle stops, reverses direction, then accelerates to produce a diagonally striated forcefield.
"For all his conceptual sophistication, Snow subscribes to a casual, all-encompassing Cage aesthetic. He's deceptively artless, a master of the visual deadpan. While trafficking in geological abstraction, he arrests the film's frantic motion, freezing some blurry onrush or a frame of flowing water. A soundtrack of coughs, yawns, and humming projector creates a further displacement. The images are distanced - accompanied by the muffled noises of an audience watching a movie. Hence the mysteriously inert title. SEATED FIGURES is about its audience. Not only are we sent flying face down over the earth, but Snow reverses the oldest concept in image-making - he juxtaposes our seated, static figures against a constantly moving ground." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
1988, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
Actors: Michael Snow, Peggy Gale; Camera: Ira Cohen; Set design and lighting: Michael Snow. Plot: A man leaves an office.
The image shows a staged, formally complete, common event. The real-time action, which took 30 seconds, was extended to become 17.5 minutes on the screen. The sync sound of the typewriter and two voices (He: "Goodbye"; She: "See you later") was slowed down the same amount of time.
1990, 16mm, color/so, 18m, $55
"Until Rameau's Nephew... no one has exhibited a film that deals so thoroughly with the range of perceptual problems elicited by the sound cinema." (M. Keller, Chicago Film Centre)
"...an achievement of the originality and brilliance of Wavelength. Snow embraces the problems on intimacy of language and thought with such variety, clarity and invention and high humour that again he seems to have made a film out of which an entire future movement could be mined." (P. Adams Sitney, Soho Weekly News)
I started scripting this film in February 1972 and writing, shooting, mixing, editing and continued till September '74. Some ideas used in it date from 1966 when I recognized in myself the ambition to make an authentic Talking Picture i.e. true to its description, it moves for its content from the facts of the simultaneities of recorded speech and image; it is built from the true units of a 'talking picture' the syllable and the frame. All the possible image/sound relationships centering around people and speech generate the movie-audience relationships: a wide range of emotional possibilities, the experience of seeing/hearing this film.'Speech', 'Language', 'Culture' - their source, their nature...recorded, imaged, prove (?) that in this case a word is worth 1000 pictures. (Michael Snow)
Scripted and Directed by Michael Snow. Shot primarily in Toronto and New York by himself, Keith Lock, Babette Mangolte, David York and others.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 4.5 hrs, $450
Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) was a French chemist who gave the first accurate scientific explanation of the mysteries of fire. He also proved the law of conservation of matter, which states that matter can be neither created nor destroyed. His work and this film are situated between modern chemistry and alchemy. The film stages a drama of abstraction and theoretical realism. La vie quotidenne seen photo-chemically and musically. This film is a materialist projected-image conversation of matter.
1991, 16mm, color/sound 53 minutes, $140 Rental
THE LIVING ROOM digitally dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of "On/Off" and/or "Absence/Presence".
2000, 16mm, color/so, 20.5m, $60
The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes "messages" between the two hemispheres. *CORPUS CALLOSUM, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, de-picts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is, "betweens". Between beginning and ending, between "natural" and "artificial", between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It's a tragi-comedy of the cinematic variables.
*CORPUS CALLOSUM juxtaposes or counterpoints a realism of normal metamorphosis (two extreme examples: pregnancy, explosions) in believable, "real" interior spaces with "impossible" shape changes (some made possible with digital animation). First the camera, then we in the audience, observe the observations of the "real" people depicted in the obviously staged situations. What we see and what they "see" is involved in shifting modes of belief. There seem to be (though there is no narrative) a Hero and Heroine. However, from scene to scene they are different people costumed identically or altered lectronically. The sound - electronic like the picture - is also a continuous metamorphosis and as the film's "nervous system", is as important to the film as the picture. Or: the sound and the picture are two hemispheres joined by the artist. *CORPUS CALLOSUM is resolutely "artificial", it not only wants to convince, but also to be a perceived pictorial and musical phenomenon.
"Although shot on video and largely computer-produced, *CORPUS CALLOSUM is almost a self-curated retrospective of Snow's career; but with a twist. Everything in this continually self-referential piece,some of which was shown in late 2000 as THE LIVING ROOM, is stretched, squeezed, and flipped - the bodies of Snow's large cast not the least. (At one point, one guy ties another in a knot.) Space is a similarly malleable object. Is the camera panning, or is the image being subjected to some sort of digital taffy-pull? "*CORPUS CALLOSUM, which is titled for the "central region" of brain tissue that acts as a conduit between the two hemispheres, can be appreciated as both a naturalistic animation and an abstract Frank Tashlin comedy. It's the first movie of the new millennium to warrant both a special issue of OCTOBER and a run at the Sunshine Theater - soon I hope." - J. Hoberman, Village Voice
2002, 16mm (from DV), color/so, 90m, 2 reels, $150 rental
Script, Direction, Design, Sound, Editing, Michael Snow. Actors--Hilda Hashempour, Mac Ebrahimzadeh, Ramin Yazdi. Camera Luc Monpelier. Production Stephanie Markowitz, Jennifer Weiss. Translation, Mani Mazinani. Funding Assistance, The Canada Council
Writing about my films has sometimes discussed the 'narrative' aspect or 'reading' of some of my 'pictorial' nature, which is much more important. Reflecting on this, I realized that I have never wanted to make a purely narrative film, never had and therefore perhaps I should. Perhaps I should finally make a film that really tells a story. Thus 'SSHTOORRTY'.
This can be seen but can it be said? I wrote the script, designed the set, directed the shoot and supervised the sound-mix and edit. The staged action was shot beginning with a camera hold on the apartment's inner doors. A man arrives carrying a wrapped-up painting. He is greeted by a woman. He unwraps the painting, shows it to her. The camera follows them to a central position in the apartment. A dispute develops and the painter smashes the painting he's just brought over the head of the woman's husband. The camera follows the painter and the wife / lover back to the door. He exits, she walks away. There is dialogue, in Farsi, but there are subtitles in English.
The film of the above-described scene was cut exactly in half and the two halves of sound and picture as super-imposed. This makes a simultaneity of actions that occurred 'linearly'. Before and After become a Transparent Now Arrival and Departure are united. It's truly 'filmic', one transparent film over another.
It's a 'painting' about a painting. I was very concerned with the mobile color mixing that would eventually happen. Colors were carefully chosen as I tried to predict how they would mix and interact. I make 'pictures' and the experience of looking at them is more important than the 'elsewhereness' of a story, even in this, my most 'story-telling' film. In that respect, part of the perception or 'reading' of the film involves one's choices of what went before and what came after in the actual pre-filmic event. The use of Farsi and the over-laying of the English subtitles were ways of adding two other layers of complexity. The film was designed to be seen several times, not just once. In my 1974 four-and-a-half-hour film Rameau’s Nephew, I used many different languages. Ones hearing of an unfamiliar language tends the mind toward the ways in which one listens to music. Speech is then more purely sound than sense. Meaning doesn't cancel hearing. A modest political edge: adultery and drinking alcohol can be severely punished in Iran. Part of the original conception was that one could satisfyingly see / hear the episode-on-episode several times. Repeated viewing reduces the strength of the realism and makes it possible for one to see truly the artifact (or, the construct), the artificiality, the art. There are, literally, layers to it and I believe that each time one sees 'it' one sees it differently. One may concentrate for example, on the moving color-mixing, or what happen to the painting or the subtitles, or the way the speech and music are superimposed on each other. And as memory can be questioned, one may question ones memory as to whether each repeat is in fact the same. Were alterations made? The title is of course the word SHORT printed right on top of the word STORY.
2005 35mm color/sound, 30 minutes $150 Rental