Martin Rumsby

Urbane trickster and humorist of the North American avant-garde, Michael Snow began his career in Toronto in the mid 1950s as a designer and painter. Also an accomplished musician, Snow is regarded today as Canada's foremost artist. Known widely for his paintings, photography, sculpture, installations and holography, it is as a film artist that Snow is most respected.

Michael Snow moved to New York in the 1960s and became involved with the New American Cinema of that era. Snow quickly turned his conceptualist sensibility to a number of works that isolated and elaborated visual qualities specific to the motion picture camera. WAVELENGTH (1967) elaborates the zoom. SEATED FIGURES (1988), the tracking shot. BREAKFAST (1976) features a camera which advances on and eventually crushes a still life subject flat against a wall. In SO IS THIS (1982) Snow addressed the relationship between words and images.

In SO IS THIS writing, language, words replace images. Every word in SO IS THIS stands, just like a film frame, as a basic building block of cinema. Words become at once both abstract and concrete, flashing one after another onto the cinema screen, creating sentences. Sentences of fixed duration. Like sitting in a cinema. SO IS THIS subtly addresses all of cinema, the maker controls how and what you read. Snow plays on conventional assumptions about film and language and the passage from one medium to another. He engages and critiques film in relation to language in a frisky and self conscious way. Snow's linguistic puns, jokes and associations quite literally open up for us the ways in which his thought processes are applied to film. Sections of the film are repeated as motifs. Words appear on the screen for varying lengths of time, in different typefaces in a musical arrangement almost as the script of a deranged newsreader. There are subtle focus changes on some of the words, others are theatrically lit, flares sometime sweep across the film frame. A section of the film is refilmed from a television set, as memory. He recommends to the audience that they learn to read French. At another point Snow challenges the Ontario Board of Censors by inserting words for images which a censor would excise from film. An act which also points to the cinema's literalness and how a skillful arrangement of sound and image far surpasses the power of words. By substituting words for images Snow questions both the literary inclination of narrative filmmaking as well as the visual bias of avant- garde filmmaking.

In watching SO IS THIS we are looking at words on a screen. Language is conceived here by Snow as a form of art, not as a form of literature. Snow ensnares you in language. You are posited as an active, engaged spectator involved in an imaginative reading of the work. What are you seeing? How are you receiving it and can you read it creatively? What does it mean to be a spectator? What does it mean to be a creator?

BREAKFAST (TABLE TOP DOLLY) (1976) is a variation on the theme of WAVELENGTH, Snow's breakthrough film of 1967. WAVELENGTH is a continuous 45 minute zoom across the interior of a New York loft which ends on a photograph of waves, an image of an image.

In BREAKFAST a camera mounted behind a Plexiglas screen on a dolly closes in on a still life subject eventually crushing it flat against a wall to create a final image that looks something like a Cubist collage. Here Snow draws art and life together. The soundtrack of a radio playing, people interacting and the clunks of objects falling off the table refers to events happening outside of the film frame. (There is more to life than art?) All motion visible on the screen is the result of a single camera movement. Snow brings painterly concerns to film, putting Twentieth Century questions of representation of the two dimensional picture plane to cinematography.

Though superficially similar the differences between WAVELENGTH and BREAKFAST are cinematically significant. A zoom presents an illusion of movement, flattening and distorting the space it appears to be moving through. A tracking shot is altogether different because it actually negotiates the space it moves through. A zoom is a two dimensional movement through three dimensional space. A tracking shot is a three dimensional movement through three dimensional space. Either way we are still left with problems of representing three dimensions on a two dimensional cinema screen via lenses ground to Quattrocento perspective. In WAVELENGTH, Snow half addresses the problem by ending the film on a photograph placed flat against a wall between two windows, denying our expectation of visual art presenting a window on the world. BREAKFAST goes further. The camera actively hunts down the subject, violently forcing it to conform to Twentieth Century notions of representation.

SEATED FIGURES (1988) is, as Snow describes it, another motion picture with a lot of motion. It opens on the title Film House, the name of the laboratory which printed the film as well as a pun of the idea of a home movie. Described by Snow as a road movie, SEATED FIGURES unveils a history of roads going back from asphalt to gravel to sand to the land. Snow attached his camera to a wooden outrigger hanging out from the back of a truck and pointing at the ground. It seems that the length of each shot is determined by the clockwork mechanism of a Bolex movie camera. (About 30 seconds). If this is so then one can easily imagine the absurdist shooting scenario for SEATED FIGURES. Snow composing a shot, winding up the camera, getting into his pick up truck, triggering the camera by remote control, followed by a short burst of driving over a predetermined route. Instead of the individual film frame here Snow refers to the mechanical clockwork wind of a Bolex camera as the basic structuring unit of SEATED FIGURES.

Snow introduces the film as a filmmaker at an experimental film screening: "Hello. Hello. The title of this film is SEATED FIGURES by Michael Snow. It was made, it was finished in January, 1988. The film is silent." Naturally, Snow is lying. The sound through SEATED FIGURES is mostly of two people, sitting at home watching a home movie. It is a soundtrack which foregrounds the act of spectatorship.

As with all of Snow's films SEATED FIGURES is much more complex than a description of its simple conception would lead us to expect. As the journey progresses shots seem to defy gravity, what was initially rendered as tangible transforms into rhythmic, waving, abstracted patterns. Snow's musical edits and structuring are unlike anything else in film. Snow takes on all of cinema.

A vehicle moving along a road is not so different from film traveling through a camera or projector gate. When Snow's truck veers off the road and lurches into the landscape it is just as film jumping out of the gate. In leaving the road Snow extends the frame, revealing that there is much more outside the frame of traveling the conventional road. But even more. Trucking wildly through the landscape Snow also appears to be mocking the cinematic achievements of Stan Brakhage. In his film THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (1981), Brakhage collected alpine vegetation then arranged and contact printed this vegetation onto unexposed film. The result are cinematic abstractions drawn from real life. Paradoxically, Snow's objective moving camera is able to achieve virtually the same effect in SEATED FIGURES as Brakhage does in THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS. The speed at which Snow's camera moves above Ontario's roads creates the same effect as projection does to Brakhage's direct film, flattening and abstracting the image.

Toward the end of SEATED FIGURES the screen darkens at the edges, the image loses definition, two hands mime the shape of a bird flapping its way across the screen, we hear laughter and applause followed by colored leader, the projector bulb blows then the house lights come up. The film is over.

In SEE YOU LATER (AU REVOIR) (1990) we see Michael Snow as a "Walking Man". In a single panning shot thirty seconds of real-time action are distended to eighteen minutes by means of a high speed video camera then step printing the video onto film. SEE YOU LATER has Snow, as a businessman, leaving his office in extreme slow motion. As a film made toward the end of his career Snow retains the simple conception of his earlier work and once again highlights cinematic duration. Filming on video saturates the color, bringing a luxuriant richness to the work. In a seeming homage to Dutch painting, a mirror image of Snow passing Peggy Gale, as his secretary, references Vermeer and the background details in this scene resemble an abstraction by Mondrian. Snow is walking a line between realism and abstraction. At two points Snow disappears, once beneath his overcoat and later behind a screen, although his shadow is cast, like a cinematic image, on the wall behind him. It is the trace, the shadow of his work that Snow is leaving for us as he moves from presence to absence.

As in so much of his other work, in SEE YOU LATER, Snow crosses boundaries which separate different media, thereby admitting postmodernist theories of dispersal. In SEE YOU LATER Snow also continues his exploration of camera and film technology, the ways in which technology enhances our ability to perceive, live in and experience the world.

Situated between the overheated subjectivity of Brakhagian cinema and the cool indifference of Warhol's urban sensibility Michael Snow's LA REGION CENTRALE (1971) is an extraordinary cinematic monument. Where Brakhage could extend a single second of consciousness out into ninety minutes of unrelieved intensity or Warhol would nonchalantly present a single eight hour long take of the Empire State Building, Snow had a complex camera apparatus designed and built to render a radical mediation on landscape, technology and representation. Snow's apparatus was capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral as determined by a series of electronic pulses guiding the machine. His film is one continuous movement across space, filmed from a remote mountaintop in Quebec, a deserted region without trace of human presence.

The placement of the camera in the landscape was of crucial importance for Snow. The camera had to be at the center of a space from which it would look out at and record all aspects of that space. LA REGION CENTRALE contests the classical tradition of a fixed viewpoint of space, a major theme of Twentieth Century art.

LA REGION CENTRALE attacks the notion of hierarchical space inherent in Renaissance fixed point perspective and narrative. Fixed point perspective are, at best, for modernist and post modernist artists, 19th Century forms of representation. A major tendency in 20th Century Western thought was toward a relativism which stresses the fundamental equality, unity and interconnectedness of things. The circular camera movements in LA REGION CENTRALE refuse to privilege any sector of the off-screen space. There is no edge to the film frame. The vision of unity which Snow proposes in LA REGION CENTRALE is that all points in space are of an equal and common nature.

The camera movement in LA REGION CENTRALE gradually develops over time in a complex musical, theme and variation structure. The first sequence, as a prelude, describes the total space of the film. Subsequent variations go on to explore the landscape by means of all the possibilities presented by the camera, film, lighting and the constantly moving camera apparatus. LA REGION CENTRALE builds to a crescendo, traveling from daylight to sunset to night-time through sunrise to daylight once again. The sunrise and sunset sections show how lighting can affect our perception and reading of a scene. The nighttime section of LA REGION CENTRALE introduces a series of apparent illusions and visual transformations which suggest the central spiritual nature of the film and its affirmation that technology can enhance our relationship with and understanding of the world.