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Michael Snow: A Brief Introduction
by 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).
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La Région Centrale
by 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 ...
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Wavelength Revisited
by 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.
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Master Lessons With Michael Snow
by Louis Goyette
The films 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?
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Weathering the Creative Storm: An Interview With Michael Snow
by Donato Totaro and André Habib
If ever the term “Renaissance Man” applied, it would be to Michael
Snow. Most artists would be pleased to have made inroads into
one art, but Snow is a strange beast, extending his creative talons
into music, painting, sculpting, photography, and film (are you
dizzy yet?). So as ecstatic as we were to have one hour with Snow
out of his extremely busy schedule, we realized given his prodigious
achievements....
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Transcending the Fragmentation of Experience: The acousmêtre
on the air in the films of Michael Snow
by Randolph Jordan
Michel Chion’s Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen presents
some compelling strategies for approaching and interpreting the
use of sound in film, and provides many avenues for using sound
as a way of understanding cinema from a more transcendental frame
of mind. What Chion discovers through his process of coming to
terms, so to speak, with his expanded vocabulary for sound analysis
is that much of the deeper experience we get from cinema is a
direct result of the transcendence....
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