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Michael Snow
Very few filmmakers have had as powerful an impact on North American independent cinema as Michael Snow. Indeed, five of this volume's interviewees (Ono, McCall, Noren, Benning, and Mulvey) talk specifically about him, as do several of the interviewees in Volume 1. The impact of Snow's workand of the breakthrough
(1967), in particularis a function of the fact that Snow came to filmmaking, not with extensive experience as a moviegoerconventional cinema never seems to have been of particular interest to himbut as an accomplished musician, painter, sculptor, and photographer, for whom the movie camera and projection space were new artistic tools to explore. While it was not his first extended filmthat was
(1964)
established him as a major contributor to the development of critical cinema.
In
Snow demonstrated a new approach to cinematic space and time, and, at least by implication, declared his independence from the reliance on narrative in both conventional and independent cinema, as well as from the exploration of the personal that was characteristic of so many of the films of the sixties.
defined a new kind of ''plot,' one closer to the geometric sense of the term than to its conventional meaning in film. Snow divided the focal length of his zoom lens into approximately equal increments and zoomed, at intervals, from the most wide-angle view of a New York City loft space to a close-up of a photograph on the far wall. The relentlessness of the viewer's journey across the loft is wittily confirmed by periodic nods in the direction of conventional narrative: near the beginning of the film, a woman (Amy
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Taubin) directs two men who move a bookcase into the space; they leave and the woman reenters with another woman; later, a man (Hollis Frampton) staggers into the loft and falls dead in front of the camera; he is discovered by Amy near the end of the film. This series of events allows
to critique the cinema's traditional reliance on story. While a mysterious death in a film would normally be a lynchpin for melodrama, in
the death is enacted precisely so that it can be ignored during the remainder of the film. Not only does the camera fail to stop for the death, the film overwhelms whatever interest we might have in the fledgling narrative by providing the eye and ear with continued stimulation of a very different order: as we cross the space by means of the periodically adjusted zoom lens, Snow continually changes film stocks, filters, and the camera's aperture, so that the loft becomes a visual phantasmagoria. And after the opening passage during which we hear 'Strawberry Fields Forever' ('Living is easy with eyes closed') on Amy's radio, the sound of a sine wave increasingly dominates the soundtrack, ironically building toward the 'climax' of our recognition that
film relentlessly refuses to conform to the 'rules' engendered by the tradition of narrative cinema.
In the years since
Snow has continued to make films that defy conventional expectations (and he has continued to work in a variety of other media). In film after film, he has explored the capabilities of the camera and the screening space and has emphasized dimensions of the viewer's perceptual and conceptual experience with cinema by systematically articulating the gap between the experience of reality and the various ways in which a film artist can depict it.
In
[
«
] (1969) the pan is the central organizational principle. The continual motion of the camera from right to left to right across the same classroom space (during the body of the film) becomes a grid within which Snow demonstrates the wide range of options panning offers.
(1969) uses a set of still photographs of potential sculpture sites in Montreal as a silent grid within which Snow can focus on the viewer's sense of duration: we see each photograph in a single, continuous shot for a different period of timeat first for longer and longer, then shorter and shorter durations.
(1970) uses the repeated presentation of slides of early Snow paintings, filmed from the side of the auditorium in which they're projected, as a grid within which he can dramatize the 'interference' created when artworks in one medium are reproduced in another medium.
(1971) extends Snow's interest in the moving camera. A complex machine designed by Snow enabled him to move the camera in any direction and at nearly any speed he could imagine as he filmed the wild, empty terrain north of Montreal: the resulting film
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immerses the audience for three hours ten minutes in an experience halfway between a landscape film and an amusement park ride. The epic '
(1974) uses a set of individual filmic actions to explore as many variations on the concept of synch sound as Snow could imagine.
(1980) compares different ways of composing film imagery with a moving camera. In
(1982) Snow uses a grid of one printed word per shot to develop a fascinating exploration of the distinctions between reading a text and experiencing a movie.
