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"Too Busy Making Work!"
Honoring Michael Snow at the
2004 Thessaloniki Film Festival
Watching the films of Michael Snow requires a fair degree of intellectual focus, not to mention patience. From his early investigations of "pure film space and light" to his latest computer-generated digital feature where he squeezes and stretches images with funhouse abandon, this Canadian native has been engaging and provoking audiences for nearly half a century.
"I want to make physical things so that the experience is a real
experience and not just conceptual," Snow has remarked. "Of course,
there are ideas in the works, but they are also body affects, like the
panning in Back and Forth (right), for example. Some of my films have caused
riots, fights, all kinds of things. People have fainted viewing La Region
Centrale. So I must be doing something right."
Indeed. During last year's 44th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, spectators were treated to a retrospective of Snow's films, a veritable psychological and physiological banquet. Expanding on the screenings was a select exhibition of the artist's sculptures, photography, and video installations at the Macedonian Museum of Modern Art. Together the two offerings reflected the discipline, and humor, of this thoroughly modern Renaissance artist.
Known as a structuralist filmmaker, Snow's work takes as its main subject matter the physical aspects of film: camera, light, projection, celluloid. His experiential works require the viewer's active collaboration — repetitive, often abstract imagery and dissonant sound reconfigure and test the elements of perception. "The two basic components that one has to work with in making cinema are duration and light," says Snow. "This, to me, is essential. I try to work with things that are specific to the medium so that the spectator has an experience that can only come from that particular means."
It is in the duration of the events filmed that Snow establishes his
high level of interactivity with the viewer. And nowhere is this more
evident than in Wavelength (1967, right), a 45-minute intermittent forward zoom
taken at slightly altered camera positions in a loft. Briefly men and
women enter and exit the frame, triggering the pretense of a narrative.
But in reality, the viewer becomes increasingly absorbed in the purpose
of the zoom and where it's heading.
Wavelength ends on a photograph of the sea that has been placed flat on
a wall between two windows. On the soundtrack we hear, among other
things, a sine wave. The sound begins as a low buzzing, increasing in
volume until the wave reaches its highest note of 1,200 cycles per second,
the aural equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Textural changes also
occur, including radical and subtle color shifts, black-and-white shots,
visible splices, and turns from day to night.
One of the most discussed avant-garde films, Wavelength has frequently been described as a metaphor for consciousness. Snow refers to it as a "summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and esthetic ideas." Whatever one's view of the work, clearly it has extended the cinematic possibilities of temporality and space.
Experiments with perception continue in Snow's other work, such as
Back and Forth (1969), an incessant panning of a classroom for 50 minutes
with a rhythmic soundtrack that resembles a ticking clock; La Region
Centrale (1971), an unorthodox 3-hour meditation on landscape where a
specially devised camera moves continuously in every conceivable direction
and at different speeds in an attempt to mimic the spherical motions of
the sun, moon, and Earth; and Corpus Callosum (2002, above), a digital piece
that transforms a modern office space into a looping mobius strip of
workstations while also focusing on a "living room" filled with
animated people and objects.
At 75, Snow has sustained a creative energy and outpouring that would be the envy of any artist. Currently, he is working on a new film built around the idea of a different image on each frame. He also continues to perform in concert — he is a noted jazz pianist. When I asked him about his thoughts on the new generation of avant-garde filmmakers, he smiled and confessed, "I'm sorry to say, I don't see many films. I'm simply too busy making work."
Thessaloniki International Film Festival is held annually in mid-November in Greece’s second-largest city. Emphasizing artistic rather than commercial fare, the festival promotes mostly young, independent directors (the international competition is open to first and second features only) while also highlighting East European and Balkan cinema. Visit the festival’s official site in English here.
May 2004 | Issue 44
Copyright © 2004 by Cleo Cacoulidis
ACCESS: The work of Michael Snow, like so much experimental cinema, is mostly unavailable to interested individuals. Hector your local cinematheque to show this material, or visit Canyon Cinema to at least dream
ALSO: More film festivals
