Constant spatial confusion and frequent trompe l’oeil effects connect these two artists. In the essay “Snow and Keaton,” the French filmmaker and theorist Érik Bullot considers the relationship between Snow’s late feature and the work of America’s greatest silent-era comedian. Discussed primarily for its slapstick bent, the film also reveals the broad net of influences that Snow’s oeuvre can claim. The film explores two environments, an office and a living room, where strange perceptual phenomena (image distortions, blurs, digital interferences) take place. Snow’s conceptual remake of Buster Keaton’s 1926 film The General, entitled * Corpus Callosum (2002), is also a primary focus of the book. This notion is again touched upon in the book’s final essay, “Strangeloves: From/De la région centrale, Air Defense Radar Station Moisie, and Media Cultures of the Cold War,” by White, an in-depth study of the technology behind La région centrale, a landscape film in which the camera is the chief protagonist. Michelson thus posits Snow’s film as an ultimate expression of voyeurism: a scopophilic pleasure, where vision is absolute, unhampered by physical impediments. But, Michelson argues, the eye’s radical mobility doesn’t necessarily de-center the spectator. For Snow’s La région centrale (1971), a special machine was designed by the engineer and cinematographer Pierre Abeloos to control a mobile camera at increasing velocity, while capturing images of the surrounding landscape.Ĭompared to the fixed eye guiding Wavelength, La région centrale was an even more radical experiment in automated motion. Michelson concludes that while a number of experimental filmmakers, such as Stan Brakhage, questioned the primacy of Renaissance perspective, Snow, who began his career as a painter, reaffirmed it. She asks whether Snow broke with the idea of a “transcendental viewer,” which has haunted art since the Renaissance. While Michelson’s 1971 essay positioned Snow in the lineage of abstract expressionists, who themselves were influenced by European expressionism and psychoanalysis, a later essay, “Toward Snow” (1978), pushes her analysis further. In this way, Wavelength called viewers’ attention to our natural propensity to create narrative structures, even where none are given. Lens and zoom thus “instill in the viewer a threshold of tension.” In common parlance, the radicalness of Snow’s work lay in its suspense, but it is a suspense film devoid of plot. In her pioneering text “About Snow” (1971), originally published in Artforum, she describes Wavelength as a rare work of pure cinema that “re-sensitized our tools of perception.” By emptying his film of dramatic action, Michelson argues, Snow shifted its focus to the camera’s movement. The collection also includes an interview with him, conducted by Michelson in 2015, addressing his personal affinity for jazz.Īmong the critical essays, Michelson’s are the most illuminating. Snow comments on his methods and responds to critics in his writings. The essays (by Michelson, White, and other scholars, as well as Snow himself) investigate Snow’s break with notions of causality, his use of fragmentation in photography, and the role that new technologies, such as CGI, play in his later films. The book situates Snow within the context of 1960s avant-garde sculpture and painting, whose primary practitioners were, like him, preoccupied with perception and framing. Michael Snow (October Files, 2019), a chronological compendium of essays that spans six decades, edited by the late American critic Annette Michelson and the Scottish poet and academic Kenneth White, reflects on Snow’s artistic development and the critical reception of his groundbreaking work. Michael Snow’s masterpiece of experimental cinema, Wavelength (1967, 45 min.) - in which a 16mm camera continuously zooms in for a week, capturing a room’s interior - forever changed how we perceive film and its possibilities. Michael Snow, edited by Annette Michelson and Kenneth White (October Files, 2019) (image courtesy of The MIT Press)
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