A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

trumpet player; Pee Wee Russell, a genius of a clarinetist. It was a fabulous job. We played in a lot of other places in Toronto, and sometimes in other parts of Ontario. And we made some records. I also started to play with my own groups occasionally because I had started to get interested in what were called 'more modern' directions. I played Thelonious Monk pieces, stuff like that. And some of the musicians I met with the Mike White band asked me to play with them. I played with Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, in Detroit and a couple of places in New York State. There's a Film Board film,

Toronto Jazz

[1963], by Don Owen, that I appear in with my quartet (it's called the Alf Jones Quartet in the film, can't remember whyAlf was the trombone player).

It was a beautiful time for me. The music was wonderful and lots was happening. I was able to get to my studio every day to do painting and sculpture. During 1959 I had done a series of abstract paintings that I'm quite proud of. In them I gradually did this flip into working with the outline of a figure.

The Walking Woman

started in 1961.

MacDonald:

Are those abstract paintings the ones in

Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film

?

Snow:

Some that I did in Europe are in that film and some of the abstract ones. But I hope you wouldn't make any judgment of the paintings from their appearance in that film!

Page 58

MacDonald:

Things were going so well here. What drew you to New York?

Snow:

Well, I had been following what was going on in New York very closely. For a long time, I had been moved (and still am) by the accomplishments of Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline. That's fantastic work, and I was carrying on my own dialogue with it, trying to define what

I

could do, what

I

could contribute, and after a while it seemed that doing this via magazines and occasional trips to the Albright Knox (in Buffalo) or to New York was not enough. I decided I should just get there. I was scared shitless, and Joyce was even more scaredso we went.

All during this period I kept thinking that in order to get somewhere and get something out of myself, I should make a choice. It seemed like the lesson was that Willem De Kooning

paints

and that's why it's so good. That's what he does; he does just that. And there's really a lot in that argument. So I tried not to play when I first went to New York. Mind you, I didn't know how I was going to make a living. It turned out that I did play a couple of times to make a couple of bucks, but basically, I was trying to get rid of music, to make it a hobby.

But when I got to New York, I had something I hadn't counted on, a contact with the most inventive music that was going on at that time, the 'free musicians.' I already knew about Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. I had their records. But I met a guy named Roswell Rudd, a great trombone player, through a Dixieland clarinetist named Kenny Divern, another fabulous musician. I had a studio with a piano in it that I made available. There was no place for them to play, and the public antipathy was incredible. Cecil was considered a total nut. It certainly seemed that way the first time you heard him, but he was, and is, amazing.

Anyway, music wouldn't go away. But I was trying to be a painter. I was working on

The Walking Woman,

which, as you said earlier, involved works of many kinds in many places. A lot of it was what I call lost works: making things that were outside, in public spaceson subways, in the street, in bookstores . . . it had a lot of range, despite the fact that it was concerned with this single outline.

The main thing I was trying to do was concentrate on visual art and get a gallery. I watched everything that was going on and gradually met people. That's when I met Hollis Frampton. I first noticed him at openings at Green Gallery. He was very noticeable! And he was at every opening. Gradually, I started talking to him, and at first I only knew that he was a photographer who was interested in art. I guess when I first met him he hadn't made any films.

MacDonald:

When did you meet him?

Page 59

Snow's Walking Woman out for a stroll.

Snow:

Probably 1963, 1964. I went to New York in 1963.

MacDonald:

In

The Walking Woman Works

you were putting the same figure in place after place, in serial fashion, which has a good deal in common with film. Were you conscious of that connection at the time?

Snow:

Well, in the work itself there was a lot of sequential stuff. There are several pieces that are, say, four or five variations of the same figure. And, yeah, I did think there was something filmic about it. And then in 1964 I made

New York Eye and Ear Control