La Région centrale je 3 sata dug film u kojem se, prvi put u povijesti, uz pomoć robotičke ruke kamera kreće kanadskim pejzažem u unaprijed programiranim kretnjama - vrti se, okreće u svim smjerovima... Apstraktno-kozmička, znanstveno-hladna vožnja pejzažom možda Mjeseca, možda eksterijerom western-filmova a možda NASA-inim simulacijskim pejzažom... Škrta divljina meditativno skenirana postaje istovremeno duhovno-strana i emotivno bliska...
Temeljno djelo jednong od najvažnijih autora eksperimentalnog filma.
La Région Centrale (1971)
«La Région Centrale» was made during five days of
shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the
shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking
speed were all determined by the camera’s settings. Anchored to a
tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward,
and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera
movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the
film location’s landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film
expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time.
Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at
that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles
of light and darkness, warmth and cold.
Martina Sauerwald
I can tell this is a film that should be seen in a theater, no, that needs
to be seen in a theater. It has no story, but unlike a Brakhage film
which you may want to study at home and watch over and over, this is
meant as an experience, more a ride than a movie. So I’ve done the
movie great harm by watching it on my laptop, a reproduction of a
reproduction of a TV screening, all low resolution with the corner of
the image defaced by a station logo. One could already convincingly
argue that I haven’t seen La Region Centrale at all, under
those conditions – but wait, it gets worse. The experience builds
(probably) over its three-hour running time, becomes (probably) more
mesmerising and abstract as the third hour wears on. But I kept putting
it on after midnight then falling asleep watching it, continuing the
next night, as if picking up the story where I’d left off. And wait,
there’s more. I thought for sure I could handle the last 45 minutes at a
time without falling asleep again (wrong, lasted 35) but I soon got
tired of the constant whirring sound effects (conforming to the strict
rule that avant-garde films need always have annoying soundtracks) so I
muted the movie and put on the latest Mogwai album instead.All these crimes I committed against the movie, but I still liked it quite a lot, certainly better than Wavelength. Most of the Michael Snow movies I’ve been able to see have been interesting, but also more fun than tedious (again, all but Wavelength) which is exceptional in the avant-garde scene.
The writeup at Shooting Down Pictures is better than anything I could come up with:
Arguably the first feature filmed by a robot, Michael Snow’s three hour exploration of the possibilities of camera movement over a barren Arctic landscape suggests many things: sci-fi space probe footage more authentic than George Lucas; a rebuff to the romantic frontier landscapes of Hollywood Westerns; an avant-garde equivalent of an amusement park simulator ride. Lensed by a specially designed rotating camera mount pre-programmed to move with stunning variety, the film begins as a slow, soothing meditation on the otherworldly textures of the Canadian wilderness, but gradually morphs into a dizzying, terrifying freakout, a relentlessly spinning gaze that pummels the equilibrium of the human eye. The film pushes the boundaries not only of human sight but of the physical earth, destroying gravity and transforming a lifeless vista into a cosmic force of light and energy. Clinically scientific in its approach yet yielding an organic, even spiritual wonder, La region centrale does not merely vindicate the oft-neglected genre of experimental film, but thrusts itself into the center of cinema at its most vital.My favorite motion is twenty minutes before the film’s end, the camera rotating while turning, but not in synch with each other, making the landscape look small and spherical but ever-changing.
Michael Snow:
The film will become a kind of absolute record of a piece of wilderness. Eventually the effect of the mechanized movement will be what I imagine the first rigorous filming of the moon surface. But this will feel like a record of the last wilderness on earth, a film to be taken into outer space as a souvenir of what nature once was. I want to convey a feeling of absolute aloneness, a kind of Goodbye to Earth which I believe we are living through. … It will preserve what will increasingly become an extreme rarity: wilderness. Perhaps aloneness will also become a rarity. At any rate the film will create a very special state of mind, and while I believe that it will have no precedent I also believe it will be possible for it to have a large audience. - deeperintomovies.net/
La Région Centrale
Peter Rist
| La Région Centrale (Quebec, 1971, 180 min., 16mm, color) is arguably
the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world, and for John
W. Locke, writing in Artforum in 1973, it was “as fine and important
a film as I have ever seen.” If ever the term “metaphor on vision” needed to
be applied to a film it should be to this one. Following Wavelength,
Michael Snow continued to explore camera/frame movement and its relationships
with space and time in Standard Time (1967) an eight minute series of
pans and tilts in an apartment living room and (Back and Forth) (1968–69),
a more extended analysis. But with La Région Centrale, Snow managed to
create moving images that heretofore could no possibly be observed by the human
eye. For this project he enlisted the help of Pierre Abaloos to design and build
a machine which would allow the camera to move smoothly about a number of different
axes at various speeds, while supported by a short column, where the lens of
the camera could pass within inches of the ground and zoom into the infinity
of the sky. Snow placed his device on a peak near Sept Îsles in Quebec’s région
centrale and programmed it to provide a series of continuously changing views
of the landscape. Initially, the camera pans through 360° passes which map out
the terrain, and then it begins to provide progressively stranger views (on
its side, upside down) through circular and back-and-forth motions. The weird soundtrack was constructed from the electronic sounds of the programmed controls which are sometimes in synch with the changing framing on screen and sometimes not. Here, allusions to other films occur, especially science fiction works like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which similarly reveals a barren, human-less primal landscape (with odd sounds) and spatially disorients the spectator. In La Région Centrale’s second hour, the world is inverted for so long, that when the camera swings vertically through a full circle to restore the horizon line to its rightful position, above the earth, it looks wrong. In the complete absence of human or animal forms, one can imagine the outlines of animals in the silhouetted shapes of rocks at twilight. It is impossible not to notice “camera movement” in this film, and, as Locke notes, one is inclined to observe the frame edge leading the movement (rather than the center) much of the time.
Credits: cinematography/editor: Michael Snow, sound: Bernard Goussard, Assist cinematography: Joyce Wieland design, fabrication and programme adaptation for camera-activating machine Pierre Abaloos, producer: Snow Selected Bibliography: John W. Locke. “Michael Snow's La Région Centrale: How You Should Watch the Best Ever Film I Ever Saw.” Artforum, Vol. 12, no. 3 (November 1973): 66–71. J. Hoberman. “Secrets of the Hand-Held Camera: Films Hollywood Won’t Allow.” Village Voice (5 April 1976): 77–78. Annette Michelson. “About Snow.” October, No. 8 (Spring 1979): 111–24. Bill Simon. “A Completely Open Space: Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale.” Millenium Film Journal, Nos. 4–5 (Summer–Fall 1979): 93–100. An abridged version of this text appeared in Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada, Peter Harry Rist, ed. (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001): 188-189. |
Wavelength (1967)
Wavelength Revisited
Donato Totaro | Thirty-five years after its inception, Wavelength (Ontario, 1967, 45
min.) remains one of the most vital and (still) groundbreaking films in the
history of experimental cinema. It is, quite simply, the “Citizen Kane”
of experimental cinema. Screenings of Wavelength in and out of academic
situations have probably generated more mixed emotions -frustration, boredom,
exhilaration and awe (sometimes in the same spectator)- than any other film.
I can vouch from personal experience of teaching this film, that Wavelength
retains its power to evoke these emotions. In fact the only time in over ten
years of teaching that I “lost my cool” in a classroom setting was after a lecture/screening
of Wavelength, when, during the discussion period, a group of students
responded angrily to being subjected to the film. After such comments as “why
do I have to watch this film,” “what a waste of film stock,” “why was this film
even made,” or “the film was poorly made,” I raised my voice in a mini-diatribe
against the commercial trash that they gladly sit through on a regular basis
(at over twice the length) and the general lack of spectatorial willingness
to engage in anything that questions traditional viewing habits (i.e. no plot,
no characters) and raises abstract formal or thematic issues. But Wavelength has also been a challenge for the seemingly more informed, film critics and theorists who have all too often incorrectly described the film as a “continuous” zoom taken from a single fixed camera position. The film begins at the widest setting of the zoom lens and concludes at its shortest, but this trajectory is neither continuous (but intermittent), nor taken from a fixed position (but slightly altered camera positions). On the soundtrack we hear (among many other things) an aural equivalent to the zoom lens shot(s), a sine wave which goes from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest note (12000 cycles per second). As Snow notes in his Offscreen interview, he is perhaps most shocked when these so-called experts fail to even mention the sound, let alone comment on how important the sound is to the film’s overall experience and the illusion of continuity (even to the point where the image of the wave acts partly as a visual pun to the aural ‘sine’ wave). The events which occur in-between (too complex to adequately describe here), both formal and “narrative,” give Wavelength its varied philosophical and cinematic meanings. There are four linked human events in the film, briefly: 1) a woman enters, followed by two men carrying a bookcase 2) two women enter the loft, one turns the radio on then off, the other shuts the window 3) a man staggers into the frame and falls onto the floor 4) a woman enters and makes a phone call to report the fallen man. The events trigger a pretense of narrative, but our concentration soon changes from an interest in the meaning of the events to an interest in the teleological purpose of the zoom: where is it heading? In Wavelength cinematic interpretations (as an examination of filmic narrative; as an ontology of filmic time/space; as a representation of transcendence) co-exist alongside non-filmic philosophical interpretations. The philosophical meaning most often ascribed is to read Wavelength as a metaphor for consciousness. In support of this I quote John Belton, who notes, “every zoom makes an epistemological statement, contemplating man’s relationship not with the world itself but with his idea or consciousness of it.” (p. 21) Hence whereas in a moving camera shot there is a physical movement of the camera through space, in the zoom shot there is no physical movement of the camera, except of course the slight back/forth movement of the lens itself, but movement in a more abstract sense: into a character’s mind, as an expression of an emotion, through an imaginary cinematic space, etc.) In addition, the many textural changes that occur in the course of the film, subtle and radical color changes, exposure changes, black & white shots, clear images, negative images, light flares, day to night changes, visible splices, and different stocks, recall David Hume’s belief that the mind is but a “bundle of perceptions.” Snow’s own description that the film was a “summation of...religious inklings....” supports a reading of the zoom’s trajectory, from a view of the loft to a full frame view of the ocean wave in the wall photo, as a transcendental journey where the spectator is “carried” from one space/time to another. It is not surprising that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the greatest ciné-philosophers, may have been influenced by this trajectory for the design of his famous penultimate shot in The Passenger (1975). There the camera also begins on a defined space, the interior of a hotel room, and dollies past a seemingly dead man lying on the bed to the window seen in the background, then out through the window to investigate the surrounding courtyard with a 360 degree dolly that ends looking back into the room from the outside (this is not a zoom shot, although there is a combination of zoom/dolly at points in the shot). Strangely enough, Wavelength’s portentous movement into the photo of the wave has influenced, consciously or not, several narrative films (in addition to The Passenger, Barton Fink 1991, Things Never Said in Playa Perdida 2001, The Shining 1980 (in their endings) and The Decline of the American Empire 1986 (in the beginning).
Credits: dir/scr/cin/ed /prod Michael Snow sound Ted Wolff Assistant Ken Jacobs act Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland, Amy Yadrin, Lyne Grossman, Maoto Nakagawa, Roswell Rudd Selected Bibliography: Bruce Elder. “Michael Snow’s “Wavelength.” Canadian Film Reader, ed. Seth Feldman and Joyce Nelson, 308-323. Toronto: Peter Martin Associates, 1977. Regina Cornwall. Snow Seen: The Films and Photographs of Michael Snow, 60-79. Toronto: PMA Books, 1980. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. New York: Dell Publishing, 1961, 13-23. John Belton: “The Bionic Eye: Zoom Esthetics,” Cineaste 9/1 (Winter 1980-81): 20-27 An early, abridged version of this text appeared in Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada, Peter Harry Rist, ed. (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001): 235-236 |
Corpus Callosum
I recently read in a film festival report that Michael Snow’s new
92-minute feature was a bit longer than it needed to be. This conjured
up visions of a test-marketing preview — cards handed out at Anthology
Film Archives with questions like, “Would an ideal length for this be 82
minutes? An hour? Three minutes? 920 minutes?” For even though this may
be the best Snow film since the La Région Centrale in
1971 — a commemorative (and quite accessible) magnum opus with many
echoes and aspects of his previous works — it enters a moviegoing
climate distinctly different from the kind that greeted his earlier
masterpieces. In 1969, the late, great Raymond Durgnat could find the
same “mixture of despair and acquiescence” in both Frank Tashlin and
Andy Warhol; today, on the other hand, avant-garde art is expected to
perform like light entertainment.
Up to a point, Snow seems ready to oblige with his irrepressible
jokiness —- a taste for rebus-style metaphors (often banal) and
adolescent pranks (a giant penis hovering over a blonde’s backside) that
makes this the least neurotic experimental film about technology
imaginable — the precise opposite of Leslie Thornton’s feature-length
cycle Peggy and Fred in Hell. If the latter is a
protracted meditation about technology as nightmare —- the nightmare
we’re all trying to wake from (which is what James Joyce’s Stephen
Dedalus called “history”) — *Corpus Callosum views technology in general, and DV in particular, as an occasion for vaudeville and slapstick. Instead of Oscar Levant in The Band Wagon
carrying both sides of a ladder, we find the same woman putting on
make-up at two separate work stations during the same pan, then
appearing a third time walking in the opposite direction. Even when a
dollop of gay s & m gets thrown in, the spirit is no different from
that of the expanding bubble-gum bubble overtaking an entire room, like
The Blob.Over four pleasurable viewings, I’ve sometimes found this cornucopia exhausting, but always assume this to be a function strictly of my own limitations. Maybe it should be called a snowjob: an encyclopedia of effects like Rameau’s Nephew… (1975) with a “false alarm” ending like the one in the 1969 Back and Forth (with credits appearing less than two-thirds of the way through, succeeded much later by a fast rewind); a meditation on consumption as messy destruction, as in Breakfast (1976) and the opening section of Presents (1982); and an overall day-to-night progression (as in the 1967 Wavelength) eventually culminating in a return to origins, the first thing Snow ever did on film: a short piece of drawn animation in 1956 of a man’s leg stretching endlessly.
Digitally Giving Time and Space the Silly Putty Treatment
The
newest effort by the experimental director Michael Snow, ''*Corpus
Callosum,'' which opens today at the Film Forum, is simultaneously
static and elastic. Though Mr. Snow credits a cast, he really uses his
actors like action figures and deploys postproduction technology to
stretch their forms and switch them around like pieces on a game board.
The project, shot on digital video, is a playful parlor trick, a departure from the performance-art films that have made this director's reputation. In keeping with his lighter side, ''*Corpus'' is also fun; imagine a Looney Tunes segment or an episode of Nickelodeon's ''Kablam!'' directed by Red Grooms. But then it starts to feel as if things are going on for too long. Mr. Snow realizes he is literally playing with time, though, and even jokes about it: he inserts the credits in the middle of the picture.
Mr. Snow, who has spent his artistic life flouting preconceptions about narrative, dispenses with anything that could be considered narrative in ''*Corpus.'' There is, however, a literal linearity, a visual pun in which the camera moves in a straight line from left to right across the screen for much of this movie.
The title, ''*Corpus Callosum,'' refers to the core of the brain,
which was once thought to be where a human's soul resided. Mr. Snow
assaults us with imagery and sound. Set in a suite of offices, with a
brief interlude in a living room, ''*Corpus'' uses an audio track filled
with the white noise of an office: the whirring of hard drives, the
grinding motor of vacuum cleaners, the irritating whine of fluorescent
lights.The project, shot on digital video, is a playful parlor trick, a departure from the performance-art films that have made this director's reputation. In keeping with his lighter side, ''*Corpus'' is also fun; imagine a Looney Tunes segment or an episode of Nickelodeon's ''Kablam!'' directed by Red Grooms. But then it starts to feel as if things are going on for too long. Mr. Snow realizes he is literally playing with time, though, and even jokes about it: he inserts the credits in the middle of the picture.
Mr. Snow, who has spent his artistic life flouting preconceptions about narrative, dispenses with anything that could be considered narrative in ''*Corpus.'' There is, however, a literal linearity, a visual pun in which the camera moves in a straight line from left to right across the screen for much of this movie.
Through the techniques of video animation, the film's pixilated so-called cast members take to yanking on one another, yielding an effect resembling that of hot mozzarella as pizza slices are pulled apart.
They also mold colleagues into fetal balls or spin fellow workers like wooden tops. This surreal activity seems as much a reaction to the oppressive office noise as anything else. Mr. Snow seems to be using the droning sounds to suggest that offices can send workers into a dream state; the cubicle becomes a fantasy site.
Mr. Snow walks us into the offices after sending several workers through the glum, greenish doors at the end of a hallway. He also lets us overhear him directing the action, as well as other snatches of on-screen conversation, throughout the film. He pushes the lens through a vast work area that seems to be roughly the size of eastern Canada.
People are so interchangeable -- and dispensable -- in this office that Mr. Snow uses a standard workplace outfit to connote their uniformity. (For men it is a lime-green blazer and orange pants and for women a burgundy skirt-and-top ensemble.) We get the point, but the movie goes on and on, using repetition to comment on repetitive behavior.
With ''*Corpus Callosum'' Mr. Snow has made a confection that depicts the mundanity of office life and the need to escape it. And when he shifts to the living room, he pops figures and objects onto and off the walls and sofas like a demented elf. In effect, he has created an art-world companion piece to Mike Judge's wonderful anticorporate comedy, ''Office Space.'' The wanton slipperiness of ''*Corpus'' and its amiable jerking and reshaping of physical time and space would make it a great piece to watch with kids and use to introduce video as art.
Since the late 1960s, Canadian avant-garde writer, painter, musician, and filmmaker Michael Snow has explored the constraints and available manipulations of space and time. With *Corpus Callosum, Snow has made a rather large, sometimes unwieldy, but surprisingly fun (if one can ever refer to structuralists as fun-lovers, Snow must be the first cited) experimental joke about how our everyday environments affect us. In a world less real than virtual, *Corpus Callosum speaks of time and space as human constructs and thus as objects to be altered.
*Corpus Callosum is a postmodern mishmash of video effects, animation, and elusive characters who may be played by two, three, even five different actors. At one point, the celluloid itself appears to twist in the middle, then emerges upside-down and on the other side. Speaking to Snow’s perpetual concerns of the inherent malleability of space and time, this image contradicts audiences’ perceptions of what film should be: narrative, linear, and character-driven.
Snow’s interests lie in human-made objects and spaces that take on computer-generated lives of their own. Offices and homes, familiar environments of the contemporary age, are here anything but typical. The office, for example, is populated by bored, overworked, and oversexed automatons, whose daily routines include large groups of people suddenly sticking together from enormous electric shocks, men literally tying each other into knots of erotic fixation, and godlike computer nerds whose monitor tampering results in grandiose color and light changes for the entire space. It’s like Office Space in the fourth dimension.
In a series of 360-degree pans across this environment, Snow shows us how this setting affects understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Two men, one white and one black, shake hands as though closing a deal. As their hands meet, the “blackness” of one man drains into the body of the other, until what once was white now is black, and vice versa. A man and woman, attempting to fit through a door marked with bathroom-type male/female symbols, push and pull each other until they become a 3D rectangle of mixed-up gender. The rectangle then moves through the office by rocking from corner to corner; no one in the film pays much attention. Why doesn’t it register as shocking? Maybe because once you, like the dotcom-ish workers in the film, have seen advances like virtual reality, and so nothing is shocking anymore. Like space, like time, black and white, or male and female, become loosely defined once the malleability of cyberspace enters the picture.
Similarly, domestic life in *Corpus Callosum is irrevocably altered by innovations. The home is filled with televisions, pizzas, and empty glasses. Intense oranges and pinks make the living room seem alive and breathing. The walls are decorated with paintings, an eye-test chart, a crutch, and a skeleton. A mirror reflecting what appears to be Snow and his film crew forms the focal point, reminding us that this film has an author, just as our own environments have human creators. In one 12-minute sequence, objects on the walls begin exploding, one at a time, into beautiful pixel starbursts. Snow, the reflected “god” (for he is creator of this space and the characters who dwell within) appears here to be an Old Testament type: he can give and he can take away.
The home’s inhabitants—a father, a mother, and a boy (who may be the only character consistently played by the same actor)—regard these incursions as confusing but not altogether out of the ordinary. They sit back and continue watching television as their surroundings change behind them. Ironically, the one environment that remains the same is the perfectly blue sky with cotton candy clouds shown on the television screen; the flatness of virtual life implies safety from change, indeed, but also boredom and immobility. Where there is no variation, there can be no playfulness and discovery. Taken one step further, Snow could well be implying that narrative filmmaking has become flat and boring and that in order to remain fresh, filmmakers, like scientists, must seek out brand new territories freed from normal restraints of space, time, and story.
While it may seem like a cop-out to call *Corpus Callosum an “experience,” that’s really what it is. With Snow’s almost cute static-filled, electronic soundtrack of modem beeps, theremin wails, clicks, clacks, and high-pitched shrieks, the film washes over like a digital information wave. This could be what it would be like to have your brain connected to the internet, to read a computer’s “thoughts.”
*Corpus Callosum isn’t for everyone. Snow’s manipulations of space and time, while rewarding, can certainly grate on one’s nerves. Snow even pokes fun at the difficulty of his own work by rolling the credits halfway through the film; one can easily imagine him sitting behind a projector, gleefully watching confused and frustrated audience members glaring at their watches and sighing in resignation. But viewed with an open mind, *Corpus Callosum offers meditations on environment, -isms, information transfer, and filmmaking itself.
Granted, these meditations can be obtuse, even illegible. Snow appears sometimes to be so enraptured with his own digital capabilities that he forgets to offer fully formed ideas. In their place, however, he offers fully formed images that, while funny, disconcerting, or even disturbing, have a definite, lasting impact. That’s more than can be said for most movies. Snow has made his “experimental” film a wilder and more visually stimulating and imaginative ride than any summer blockbuster. Hollywood and the avant-garde elite alike might start paying attention. Snow’s work could well become the basis for both entertainment and art in a world that appears increasingly based in science fiction rather than tradition. - Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece
Corpus Callosum (2002, Michael Snow)
This was both wonderful – an inventively whimsical little ride of a rigorous art film – and tedious in that way that non-narrative films can be. It wouldn’t be a Snow work if it didn’t test my patience a little – it’s part of his charm. This kind of thing is always very different with an audience, not that I think it’s likely I’ll ever get the chance. I picked up visual similarities to Presents and Sshtoorrty… not so much Wavelength unless you count every zoom as a reference to Wavelength (which I guess some critics do).People walk through a door with the title printed on it (this is where the zoom comes in), while we hear Snow, offscreen, instructing each on the entrance of their timing. Cut to inside the office, and the camera rolls to the right, an infinite camera move since the set is digitally joined at the seams. He electrocutes all his actors, a chair disappears in a lap dissolve, blatant digital effects pop up, then the picture twists like a ribbon as it transitions to next scene. Apparently these are many different actors dressed similarly to give the appearance of a regular cast of characters, but I can’t see subtleties like that on my VHS copy… a shame.
A family sits in their garishly (digitally) decorated living room with a wall mirror reflecting the camera until objects fly off the wall and destroy themselves while the people sit still staring at the sky inside their television. Obnoxious noise permeates, except when one would expect a sound effect (during an explosion, say) when it goes silent.
A classroom is shot from above until the kids notice the camera, stack their desks so they can reach it.
Two people enter a too-small doorway at the same time, fusing and morphing into a slow-moving doorway-shaped block, which lumbers back into the infinite-loop office set. The credits show up before the hour mark and begin to lap themselves. The whole movie rewinds. Then at the end a couple enters a cinema and sits down to watch an early animated work by Snow.
J Hoberman calls it “that rarest of things—a summarizing work. Like Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman or Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, it could be used to conclude Motion Pictures 101. … Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow’s structuralist epics – Wavelength and La Région Centrale – announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.
Hoberman again: “a bonanza of wacky sight gags, outlandish color schemes, and corny visual puns that can be appreciated equally as an abstract Frank Tashlin comedy and as a playful recapitulation of the artist’s career.”
Pop Matters:
Similarly, domestic life in *Corpus Callosum is irrevocably altered by innovations. The home is filled with televisions, pizzas, and empty glasses. Intense oranges and pinks make the living room seem alive and breathing. The walls are decorated with paintings, an eye-test chart, a crutch, and a skeleton. A mirror reflecting what appears to be Snow and his film crew forms the focal point, reminding us that this film has an author, just as our own environments have human creators. In one 12-minute sequence, objects on the walls begin exploding, one at a time, into beautiful pixel starbursts. Snow, the reflected “god” (for he is creator of this space and the characters who dwell within) appears here to be an Old Testament type: he can give and he can take away.
NY Times:
In keeping with his lighter side, *Corpus is also fun … But then it starts to feel as if things are going on for too long. Mr. Snow realizes he is literally playing with time, though, and even jokes about it: he inserts the credits in the middle of the picture. … We get the point, but the movie goes on and on, using repetition to comment on repetitive behavior.Rosenbaum, who ranked it his #1 movie of 2002, above even Platform: “Not counting the asterisk, the title refers to the tissue connecting the hemispheres of the brain, an apt reference given the prodigious and joyful inventiveness on display.”
In Snow’s description he says:
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.… a shame, since my copy had lousy sound.
Funny that I watched this the day after The Last Movie, since it turns out Snow put out a record called “The Last LP”.
Snow, interviewed:
“Although it was all done in the computer, so there isn’t any film in it except for a little tiny bit at the end which is something I did in 1956 and is in a sense my first film. The film I usually refer to as my first film A to Z which is a cut out animation film in 1956. Where as what appears at the end here is, well something which we used to call flimsies. You see I started out in animation and that is how I got involved with film. We used to make the drawings on tracing paper, we would put them on pins with one over the other on a light box and you would draw them. And I did this little sequence of this leg stretching in 1956, but I never shot it, I just kept it as a flimsy. So I guess that is in a sense my first film or at least it was intended to be shot as film. But it was not shot as a film.”
Offscreen: Has it changed over the years, the audience reception?
Michael Snow: Yes. I don’t know what is happening to people but they are not as tough as they used to be. … I really want to make physical things so that the experience is a real experience and not just conceptual. Well yes there are ideas in the works, but they are also body affects, like the panning, for example in Back and Forth. I’ve seen someone get sick and people have fainted with La Region Centrale, so I must be doing something right.- Brandon's movie memory
RAMEAU'S NEPHEW BY DIDEROT (THANX TO DENNIS YOUNG) BY WILMA SCHOEN
... Excerpts:
“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
| WORKING on MOVEMENTS OF PERCEPTION with MICHAEL SNOW |
"The Viewing of Six New Works
is a light projection composition derived from the essentialized
movements of eyes and head, that a possible person might make in looking
at a rectangular object on the wall (i.e., a "painting", a
"photograph"). Each hypothetical wall rectangle is perceived
differently. This is shown by the different "personal" gestures involved
in the revealing of the rectangle. When attention is not being paid to
it the object/rectangle is not there.
The work is an attempt to present only the movements of perception, not perception itself. The art of looking." - Michael Snow Canadian filmmaker-artist Michael Snow came to the Derivative studio a few months ago to see Greg Hermanovic about a way to realise a piece he had in mind for an upcoming solo show in New York. The thrill of working with Michael Snow will be self-evident to those already familiar with the artist and his highly influential body of work which spans more than five decades. Many artists have attributed Snow's work to having changed the course of their lives and the art they've gone on to make as Mark Fell the multi-disciplinary artist who is also one half of SND tells us here. "I first saw Michael Snow's film Wavelength at college when I was studying experimental film and video and was immediately mesmerized by this work. In particular I was drawn to its organization of time, the relationship this had to technology and process, and the uncompromising structural linearity of the film. However the principal appeal of this work was its central obscurity whereby nothing was totally clear, like a puzzle that was deliberately impossible to resolve. These influences would emerge several years later in the music and sound pieces I made." Snow's work has generally been received as groundbreaking, or, as breaking into future grounds is perhaps even more to the point. There's also a pronounced sense of play and testing in the way the artist relates what he's thinking about. The following quote possibly most succinctly describes what I'm getting at: In his 2002 review of *Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes for Village Voice : “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow's structuralist epics—Wavelength and La Région Centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” (Greg Hermanovic's prior experience working with Snow was in producing the 74 special effects for *Corpus Callosum using PRISMS from Side Effects Software, of which Greg is a co-founder. PRISMS led to the development of Houdini, subsequently evolving into TouchDesigner at Derivative.)    Michael arrived at the office with a folder of well-defined specs -- drawings of dimensioned rectangles, 6 of them, all differently proportioned to represent 6 new works. He described that he was looking for a way to animate these to represent the way we look at art. Essentially, each 'piece' wasn't the actual work of art but the way a viewer might look looking at that work. How do we look when we look at art and how to represent that? Michael continued that for this to work it couldn't be key-framed animation as that would look fake. He took one of the cutout rectangles and slid it around its frame to demonstrate how the more authentic approach would be to perform this movement. Having seen Michael play music on dozens of occasions Greg knew Michael to be a fantastic pianist and Cat synthesizer player and the idea of his performing the motion of the rectangle was quite natural versus other methods of keyframing or stop-frame motion.  We talked for a little while about possible ways of performing such a thing and then Greg showed Michael some of the work recently produced with TouchDesigner. One of these being an experimental application of Greg's made to test a new touchscreen that allowed for up to 40 points of contact. It consisted of puffy clouds a person would create with their fingertips and then release to watch float away. The application amused Michael who got the hang of it very quickly.    Two days later Michael called and said, "Sure, let's try that touchscreen method out." and two days after that, Greg built an application in TouchDesigner called the V6 (Viewing of 6 New Works). The V6 application uses a 23" touchscreen to record Michael's 2-finger movements as he moved a rectangle on the touch screen. It captured Michael's motions for each of the 6 "pieces" which were then rendered and output as colored, cropped and sized rectangles to 60 frame-per-second HD MP4 movies. A 6-in-1 composite of the pieces was made so we could see all 6 acting together on one projector, but it wasn't until the Jack Shainman gallery that we saw it all together at scale with the added delightful effect of reflected colored light echoing off other surfaces.    "The Viewing of Six New Works is a new seven-part projection which draws on Snow's oeuvre to examine the nature of perception and the physical relationship of the artwork to the viewer. The light projections simulate the varying ways a person might look at a rectangular wall-mounted artwork by digitally mimicking and essentializing the movement of the eyes. The gestures of viewing are revealed as the shifting focus of the spectator's gaze becomes fleetingly tangible and physically manifested through the piece. "The work is an attempt to present only the movements of perception, not perception itself," explains Snow, "the art of looking at art."" Jack Shaiman Gallery, Program Notes. The show at the Jack Shaiman Gallery in Chelsea was enthusiastically-received and the opening well-attended by long-time friends of Michael and New York's art elite. As Linda Yablonsky writes for ArtForum: "Nothing was polluted at Jack Shainman Gallery, where the structuralist Canadian filmmaker-artist Michael Snow was welcoming friends like Ken Jacobs, MoMA curator Barbara London, Performa director RoseLee Goldberg, the New Museum’s Massimiliano Gioni, and select others to a private preview of his first New York show in seven years. The main event was a new, and deeply beautiful, seven-channel projection that mirrors the movement of the eye as it studies an artwork—art seeing art... As curator Christopher Eamon noted, some old film purists have discovered digital technology and they’re running it to the outer limits of perception." Update Jan.24.12: "Greg was the technical consultant on my 90 minute digital 'film' *Corpus Callosum completed in 2000. he also appears in it. He's great to work with, he's able to make daunting scientific issues seem understandable. When I was thinking about making The Viewing of Six New Works I thought to ask him if certain things could be done. He answered by proposing a "hands-on" method that was completely appropriate to my intentions in conceiving of the work." - Michael Snow  - Text and photos by Isabelle Rousset |
Master Lessons With Michael Snow
Louis Goyette, (translated from French by Donato Totaro) The experimental works of Michael Snow require a certain intellectual disposition.
To be fully understood and appreciated they should be placed within the context
of art history, and more specifically modernism, where each medium’s intrinsic
value is maintained. But aren’t such pretensions to a medium’s purity merely
utopian, or in the least fragmentary or incomplete? When considering the category
of structural cinema, into which many of Snow’s work fall, it is difficult to
deny that other arts have had an influence (to varying degrees) on the development
of certain formal characteristics of this type of experimental cinema. Can’t
we see echoes of the fixed camera, the loop, the flicker effect, and rephotography
[1] in Andy Warhol’s serial photography? Or again in the work of such minimalist
American composers as Riley, Reich, and Glass, not to mention the repetition
in musical enunciation that has been manifested in earlier works as varied as
Ravel’s Bolero or the primitive music of African drums?
It is certainly not a coincidence that Michael Snow decided to install his camera within the four walls of a classroom for the purpose of his film Back and Forth. Even if he is not present in the film, Snow nevertheless proudly wears the mantle of pedagogue, and invites his spectators (who become his students) in an experience of pure perception. In a letter to Peter Gidal dated March 1972, Snow refers to Back and Forth as an “educational film” which is a visual demonstration of the theory of relativity: E=MC2: in other words, the representation of a solid body (the classroom which becomes the mass) is transformed into energy (light) by means of speed (that of the camera, which executes horizontal and then vertical pans of varying speeds). [3]
La Région Centrale and Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1972-1976) are also films that revisit and redefine the great pictorial genres of landscape and still life. In the first, Snow refuses to enclose the landscape in a fixed frame that would be governed by predetermined compositional schemas, and provokes an overflow of the represented landscape by constantly allowing it to exceed the limits of the frame, and this by means of an infinite number of camera movements generated by a mechanical arm controlled at a distance. In the second, Snow switches the transparency of the classic still life for a space marked by its opacity. The contents on the table are of carton –and, brimming with irony, traditionally inanimate ‘still life’ objects are daringly animated on screen- as the camera’s slow advance adds increased disorder on the table. So Is This, a film dedicated uniquely to the written text, is one of Snow’s most interactive films because the filmmaker addresses the spectators directly and invites them to read a text which unfolds on the screen word after word. Always the pedagogue, this time Snow becomes a grammarian, outlining the similarities that exist between a written and read text and a filmed text. The word, semantic unit of the text, finds its equivalent in the shot, semantic unit of the film. Each unit is organised into a discourse by the intermediation of montage. Interactivity is even more important here, where the spectator, in unison with the reading of the text, tries to guess the word which will follow, much like the spectator trying to anticipate what action will follow in a fiction film. Closely linked to structural cinema, the insistence on duration can also be seen as being particularly appropriate to Snow’s pedagogical methods. In effect, the more time we take to explain a concept, the clearer and more convincing the exposition. This slow progression of time, even in Snow’s shorter works, favors this interrogation on the part of the spectator, in search of minute changes within the interior of the frame, because, contrary to those who allow this apparent inertia to assume itself, many things happen in a Michael Snow film for those willing to carefully linger on the slightest visual and aural details they receive. Then, at the end of the pedagogical explication which imposes itself across the duration, is the reward. Beyond the fragments of narrative and humor present in many of Snow’s films, we often find a crescendo construction leading to a coda, which sums up all that we have previously seen and/or heard. Back and Forth represents, in the filmmaker’s own words, a very physical visual and auditory experience, where the immediate effect closely resembles the experience of being on drugs. The coda to La Region Centrale is exemplary in this type of reaction and perhaps marks a summit in the intensity of the perceptual experience lived by the spectator. The speed of the camera movements, executed in every possible direction, almost entirely destroys the materiality of the represented landscape, and the spectator’s gaze, difficult to stabilize on a fixed point on the screen, sends visual stimuli to the brain which can provoke an accelerated heartbeat and sometimes nausea or hyperventilation. In this sense, many of Snow’s films, at once jubilant and ‘extreme,’ and verging on strong sensations, ultimately provokes in the spectator an ecstatic reaction, a veritable apotheosis of the filmic experience just lived. Endnotes 1. It is P. Adams Sidney who defines these principle formal characteristics of the structural film in his book, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1943-2000) 2. Annette Michelson, “Towards Snow”, Michael Snow, “Two Letters and Notes on Films” in P. Adams Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York, New York University Press, 1978. 3. Michael Snow, “Two Letters and Notes on Films” in P. Adams Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York, New York University Press, 1978. 4. See the excellent article by Michel Larouche, “So Is This: la transgression des théories”, in Cinéma: théories et discours, Montréal, Cinémathèque Québécoise, 1984. Weathering the Creative Storm: An Interview with Michael Snow Donato Totaro and André Habib Introduction and "Pauses" by Donato Totaro
|
Interior of the Eaton Centre showing one of Michael Snow's best known sculptures Flightstop, which depict Canada Geese in flight.
Michael Snow: A Brief Introduction
Peter Rist The top of Michael Snow’s curriculum vitae reads, born: Toronto, Ontario, 10
December, 1929. Occupation: filmmaker, musician, visual artist, composer, writer,
sculptor. As Canada’s best-known living artist, Snow is also one of the world’s
two most highly acclaimed experimental filmmakers (the other being Stan Brakhage,
US). Although Michael Snow practiced as a visual artist in Toronto in the 1950s,
Canadian art critics as a whole only began to champion his work after he moved
to New York City with his wife, Joyce Wieland, in 1962. In the 1960s, he developed
a reputation for being an important innovator in the fields of Pop and Minimalist
art, with his “Walking Women” series, and with his film work. Retrospectively,
his second film, New York Eye and Ear Control (1964), is now viewed as
being a key to the important contrapuntal complexities of Snow’s oeuvre. In
it, the improvised, spontaneous, “expressionist” and “emotional” music of avant-garde
jazz musicians Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock
and Sonny Murray “coexists” with the “classical,” measured, “composed,” and
“intellectual” filmed images (in Snow’s own words).
The term “Renaissance man” is greatly overused, but is an apt moniker for Michael Snow who is an accomplished writer, with significant things to say about visual art and film, and an important figure on the avant-garde, improvisational music scene. He also has a great sense of community, being a principal supporter over the years of Toronto’s non-profit cultural institutions including the Music Gallery and the Funnel Film Cooperative, and especially the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, which he has kept operational almost single handedly by depositing all his films in their care. In 1994 the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario collaborated on “The Michael Snow Project,” an extensive retrospective of the artist’s work from 1951–1993, through four separate exhibitions, and which also included the publication of four books. The recent retrospective of Snow’s multifaceted work in Montreal at the 2002 Festival International Nouveau Cinéma Nouveau Médias (October 10-20) is evidence of his continued creativity (with a new feature length film, Corpus Callosum, a live concert, the launch of his DVD-Rom, Digital Snow) and importance in the field(s) of avant-garde art.
Selected Bibliography: P. Adams Sitney. “Michael Snow’s Cinema,” in Michael Snow /A Survey: 79–84. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with the Isaacs Gallery, 1970. Annette Michelson. “Toward Snow: Part 1.” Artforum, Vol. 9, no. 19 (June 1971): 30–37. Michael Snow, ed. 1948–1993: Music/Sound, The Michael Snow Project. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, The Power Plant, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1993. Jim Sheddon, ed. Presence and Absence: The Films of Michael Snow 1956–1991, The Michael Snow Project. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1995. An abridged version of this text appeared in Guide to the Cinema(s) of Canada, Peter Harry Rist, ed. (Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2001): 212-213. |
Michael Snow, CC (born December 10, 1929) is a Canadian artist working in painting, sculpture, video, films, photography, holography, drawing, books and music.
Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers[1][2] and is the subject of retrospectives in many countries. In his 2002 Village Voice review of *Corpus Callosum, J. Hoberman writes: “Rigorously predicated on irreducible cinematic facts, Snow's structuralist epics—Wavelength and La Région Centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” *Corpus Calossum was screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and the Los Angeles film festivals amongst others. In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Douglas Edwards Independent Experimental Film/Video Award for *Corpus Callosum. His numerous films have premiered in major film festivals all over the world. Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow with Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg to make short films, Preludes, for the 25th Anniversary of the festival. Wavelength has been designated and preserved as a "masterwork" by the Audio-Visual Preservation Trust of Canada[3] and was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century .[4]Music
Originally a professional jazz musician, Snow has a long-standing interest in improvised music, as indicated by the soundtrack to his film New York Eye and Ear Control. As a pianist, he has performed solo and with other musicians in North America, Europe and Japan. Snow performs regularly in Canada and internationally, often with the improvisational music ensemble CCMC and has released more than a half dozen albums since the mid-1970s. In 1987, Snow issued The Last LP (Art Metropole), which purported to be a documentary recording of the dying gasps of ethnic musical cultures from around the globe including Tibet, Syria, India, China, Brazil, Finland and elsewhere, with more thousands of words of pseudo-scholarly supplementary notes, but was, in fact, a series of multi-tracked recordings of Snow himself, who gave the joke away only in a single column of text in the disc's gatefold jacket, printed backwards and readable in a mirror. One track, purported to be a document of a coming-of-age ritual from Niger, is a pastiche of Whitney Houston's song "How Will I Know."Other media
Snow's works have been in Canadian pavilion at world fairs since his famous Walking Women sculpture was exhibited at Expo 67 in Montréal. His recent bookwork BIOGRAPHIE of the Walking Woman / de la femme qui marche 1961-1967 (2004) was published in Brussels by La Lettre vole. It consists of images of the public appearances of his globally famous icon.Snow was one of the four performers of the rarely performed Steve Reich piece Pendulum Music on May 27, 1969 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The other three were: Richard Serra, James Tenney and Bruce Nauman.
Anarchive2: Digital Snow describes Michael Snow as “one of the most significant artists in contemporary art and cinema of the past 50 years.” This 2002 DVD was initiated by Paris’ Centre Pompidou and was produced with the support of la foundation Daniel Langlois, Université de Paris, Heritage Canada, the Canada Council, Téléfilm Canada and Montreal’s Époxy. It is an encyclopedia of Snow's works across media, browsed in a manner inimitably and artfully created by Snow. Its 4,685 entries include film clips, sculpture, photographs, audio and musical clips, and interviews.
Major installations
- "The Windows Suite" is a permanent installation consisting of 32 varied sequences of images, which are presented on 65" plasma screens in 7 of the windows of the façade of the Toronto Pantages Hotel and Spa and related condo buildings facing Victoria Street in central Toronto. Some of these sequences one might possibly glimpse in the windows of a sophisticated hotel, condo, spa and parking garage building, but many sequences are “impossible,” e.g. in one sequence fish swim from window to window. This installation was opened as an official event of the Toronto International Film Festival September 2006.
- Flightstop - Toronto Eaton Centre a collection of life sized Canada geese in flight hanging over the main section of the mall. In 1982, the installation was the subject of a leading Canadian court decision on moral rights, Snow v. The Eaton Centre Ltd.
- The Audience (1989) - SkyDome (now Rogers Centre in Toronto) is a collection of larger than life depictions of fans located above the northeast and northwest entrances. Painted gold, the sculptures show fans in various acts of celebration.
- A to Z (1956)
- New York Eye and Ear Control (1964)
- Short Shave (1965)
- Wavelength (1967)
- Standard Time (1967)
- One Second in Montreal (1969)
- Dripping Water (with Joyce Wieland, 1969)
- <----> (AKA Back and Forth) (1969)
- Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film (1970)
- La Région Centrale (1971)
- Two Sides to Every Story (double 16mm installation, 1974)
- 'Rameau's Nephew' by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974)
- Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976)
- Presents (1981)
- So Is This (1982)
- Seated Figures (1988)
- See You Later (1990)
- To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991)
- Prelude (2000)
- The Living Room (2000)
- *Corpus Callosum (2002)
- WVLNT ("Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time") (2003)
- SSHTOORRTY (2005) - wikipedia
MICHAEL SNOW was born in Toronto not so long ago, and lives there now - but has also lived in Montreal, Chicoutimi and New York. He is a musician (piano and other instruments) who has performed solo as well as with various ensemble (most often with the CCMC of Toronto) in Canada, USA, Europe and Japan. Many recordings of his music have been released. His films have been presented at festivals in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Netherlands and USA, and are in the collections of several archives, such as Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the Royal Belgian Film Archives, Brussels, and the Oesterreichesches Film Museum, Vienna. His film “Wavelength” won the Grand Prize at the International Experimental Film Festival in Belgium in 1967. Another film “So Is This” won the Los Angeles Film Critics award in 1982.
He is a painter and sculptor, though since 1962, much of his gallery work has been photo-based or holographic. Work in all these media is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including for example the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne and Vienna), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des Beaux-Arts and Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal.
He has done video, film and sound installations, and designed books, examples of the latter being Micheal Snow/A Survey (1970) and Cover to Cover (1975). Retrospectives of his painting, sculpture, photoworks and holography have been presented at the Hara Museum (Tokyo), of his films at the Cinémathèquie Française (Paris), Anthology Film Archives and L’Institut Lumière (Lyons) and of his work in all media simultaneously at the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1994. Additional retrospective exhibitions have been mounted at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Musée d’art contemporain (Montreal).
Solo and group shows of his visual-arts works have been presented at museums and galleries in Amsterdam, Bonn, Boston, Brussels, Kassel, Los Angeles, Lucerne, Lyons, Minneapolis, Montreux, Munich, New York, Ottawa, Paris, Pittsburgh, Quebec City, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere.
Michael Snow has executed several public sculpture commissions, the most well known being Flight Stop at Eaton Center and The Audience at Skydome, both in Toronto. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975) and the Order of Canada (1982).
-Michael Snow
Music For Piano, Whistling, Microphone And Tape Recorder (1975)
Falling Starts (Beginning)
Piano, Tape [Tape Recorder] – Michael Snow, 21:09
Piano, Tape [Tape Recorder] – Michael Snow, 23:00
Whistle, Electronics [Microphone] – Michael Snow, 26:05
Piano, Electronics [Microphone], Tape [Tape Recorder] – Michael Snow, 22:43
Falling starts for piano and tape recorder.
W in the D for whistling and microphone.
Left right for piano, microphone and tape recorder.
Produced by the Isaacs Gallery, 832 Yonge St., Toronto, Michael Snow and Chatham Square.
Two Radio Solos (1980)
Total time: 86:26
Recorded 1980
Cassette released by Freedom In A Vacuum, 1988
Two Radio Solos is a cassette of 2 playing-the-radio improvisations done in 1980 and released in 1988 by a no longer existing Toronto company (it’s still available though).’
Apart form being one of the greatest experimental film makers of all time, Canadian Michael Snow (b Toronto 1929) has also extensively played piano, trumpet, synth and percussion on numerous records and live performances. His recorded output includes many jazz and improvisation records, with the Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC) amongst others. Snow issued several legendary experimental albums on his own as well, like 1975’s ‘Musics For Piano, Whistling, Microphone And Tape Recorder’ [excerpt here] or ‘The Last LP’ in 1987 (full album here]. ‘Two Radio Solos’ was recorded in between those 2 masterpieces and offers lenghty improvisations played on a Nordmende radio receiver (pictured above). Here as well, Snow is dealing with long durations, like in his films ‘Wavelength’ (1966-67) and ‘La Région Centrale’ (1971). The tracks are vast collages of foreign radio broadcasts, static bursts and abstract electronic sounds, all ‘played’ with the radio surfing the shortwave frequencies (2 to 30 MHz). Chinese and Russian languages are recognizable, as well as english. I suspect there was a kind of post-production editing of one kind or another, contrary to what Snow states on the cover: some recordings are noticeably sped up, some passages juxtapose 2 sound sources and some cut-ups are obvious. The B side is a joyous collage of languages from around the world, embarking many exotic world musics, lounge music, electronic sounds and gray noise as well, all sourced from the Nordmende. ‘The Papaya Plantations’ at times sounds like regular electroacoustic music, but mostly like an autonomous sound organism with a noisy life of its own. In the liner notes to ‘Musics for Piano, Whistling...’, Snow writes about the ‘hearing/seeing/thinking experience of certain parts of certain of my films’. I assume one could consider the radio listener as defined by all the wavelengths he receives at a given moment, so that the human being is inhabiting a specific region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Listening to the radio you tune to all frequencies, all at once. This tape conjures such magic. PS: I really wonder where is located the ‘North Canadian ca
bin’ where this was supposedly recorded. I can’t help envisioning a desolate and isolated landscape like ‘La Région Centrale’. -- Continuo
The Last LP (1987)
Art Metropole – #1001
Producer, Written-by, Percussion, Drums, Trumpet, Vocals, Synthesizer [Casio], Tape – Michael Snow
Wu Ting Dee Lin Chao Cheu (Announcing The Arrival Of Emperor Wu Ting) performed by Orchestra Of The National Music Insitute, Seoul Korea.
Si Nopo Da (By What Signs Will I Come To Understand?) performed by Tribe Of Niger, S.E Africa.
Ohwachira, Water ceremony performed by Miantonomi and Cree Tribespeople.
I Ching Dee Yen Tzen (The Strings Of Love) performed by Tam Wing Lun on the Hui Tra.
Full To The Brim recorded in Varda, Carpathia, Romania.
Speech In Klogen performed by Okash, Northern Finland.
Mbowunsa Mpahiya performed by Kpam Kpam Tribe, Angola, West Africa.
Quuiasukpuq performed by Tornarssuk Tribe, Siberia
Amitabha Chenden Kala performed by Monks Of The Kagyupa Sect, Bhutan.
Roiakuriluo performed by Sabane in Elahe, Brazil.
Raga Lalat performed by Palak Chawal, Benares, India.
"Title of the album refers to the disappearance of the 331/3 rpm microgroove vinyl/stylus format. This recording was issued in the last days of the LP and was conceived of then as an investigation into the effects (both negative and positive) of "Western" recording technology on the world's few remaining, at the time of recording, ancient pre-industrial cultures."
Reissue on CD under the same catalogue number in 1994.
All informations taken from the sleeve and reproduced here are part of the record as a pure conceptual artefact (a man-made object taken as a whole). In fact all recordings were performed and "assembled by" the artist himself and subsequently all other credits mentioned on the text sleeve - also written by Michael Snow - are completely invented.
Sinoms (1989)
Composed By – Michael Snow
Art Metropole – 001185
"Sinoms" is a sound work composed and recorded by Michael Snow, originally produced for the exhibition "Paysages Verticaux" at the Musee du Quebec in 1989. The work manipulates 22 voices reading the names of 34 mayors of Quebec City, beginning with the first mayor Elzear Bedard, elected in 1833.
Hearing Aid (2002)
Alto Saxophone – John Oswald
Performer [Noise], Synthesizer – Michael Snow
Voice – John Oswald, Michael Snow, Paul Dutton
Alto Saxophone – John Oswald
Performer [Noise], Synthesizer – Michael Snow
Voice – John Oswald, Michael Snow, Paul Dutton
Published as a catalogue (ISBN 3-932513-34-7) for the exhibition of Michael Snow's sound works at Gallery Klosterfelde in Berlin, Germany (June 28th to September 20th 2002). Texts by Ariane Beyn in English and German.
Interview & session recorded by Paul Hodge in April 2002.
Hearing Aid recorded by Michael Snow in April 2002.
- www.ubu.com/sound/snow.html
Video:
So This Is (1982) Sshtoorrty (2005) Michael Snow Up Close (1996, documentary by Jim Shedden & Alexa-Frances Shaw)
Michael Snow is considered one of Canada's most important living artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explores the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompasses film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprises a thorough investigation into the nature of perception.
While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Controldocuments his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich.
At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, includingBack and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such asFlightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he has focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engages in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality.
Michael Snow was born in Toronto, Canada in 1929. He studied at Ontario College of Art. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Order of Canada, and two Los Angeles Film Critics Awards. Snow has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; XXV Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Kunstmuseum, Luzern, Switzerland; List Gallery, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The Power Plant, Toronto; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montréal; and Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, among others. His group shows include the London, Cannes, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and Toronto film festivals; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Documenta 6, Kassel; Musée Carnavalet, Paris; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Snow has had film retrospectives at Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Osterreichisches Film Museum, Vienna; Image Forum, Tokyo; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; and Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Brussels, among many others. He has taught at Yale University, Princeton University, Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles, France; Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; and le Fresnoy, Tourcoing, France, and has received Snow has received honorary degrees from Nova Scotia College of Art And Design; University of Toronto, and Université de Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne, among others.
Snow lives in Toronto. - www.ubu.com/film/snow.html
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