Michael Snow

"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in imitation of three historic montage styles, for three perceptual modes mimed by that work." -HF

An unreleased diary film shot during the Fairleigh-Dickinson Artist Seminar simultaneous to the production of Back and Forth by Michael Snow.

MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow's creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow's dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Two twenty-something women dream of the ideal man and slowly realize that reality is very different from their fantasies.

Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

Hand processed 35mm portrait of Michael Snow.

This is the sound recording of the interview that Michael Snow, filmmaker, sculptor, photographer and visual artist, gave to Gérard Courant for the magazine Art press, published in February 1979, in its number 25. A great connoisseur of the Canadian artist's work and one of the first to pay tribute to him in 1973 in the magazine Zoom, Noël Simsolo accompanied the two filmmakers at the beginning of the discussion.

"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Walking Woman. My worst film."

Interview and profile of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow from 1983. Includes extracts from 'Back and Forth', 'Wavelength', 'La Region Central', 'So Is This' and gallery piece 'Two Sides To Every Story'. Made for Channel 4 'Visions' and broadcast 19 January 1983.

This is an interesting little documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which was apparently one of the global hotbeds of experimental/avant garde art- particularly video art- back in the 70's & 80's. MacGillvary interviews a number of the artists that were formative to the program. Many of whom would go on to become teachers at the school.

A serendipitous encounter with a younger artist gives legendary Canadian art icon Michael Snow the opportunity to reflect on his life and career.

World renowned artist and filmmaker Michael Snow continues to push the boundaries of yet another field, music. The avant-garde greats mastery of free-improvisation shines through in this rare solo piano performance at Konzerthaus, Vienna.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.

In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activities.

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features the voice of artist Michael Snow. Frampton would place a tape deck at the front of a room, press play, and walk to the back to run a 16mm projector. Presented here is the audio portion of the piece, recreated with images designed to replicate Frampton’s visuals.

Toronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a cross-section of jazz bands of that city: the Lenny Breau Trio, the Don Thompson Quintet and the Alf Jones Quartet. Their styles show creative self-expression, hard work, and improvisation.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante

Reel 5 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…

Portrait of Michael Snow

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room.

A continuous zoom traverses the space of a breakfast table, serving as a grand metaphor for indigestion.

Panning shot of a room while a group of people discusses film while eating at a table.

English and French words flash individually over a black background.

A camera moves back and forth at an increasing pace. Back and forth, back and forth...

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a 'real' unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material 'investigations' of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life's irreversible disappearance.

Michael Snow's 1970 film A Casing Shelved combines a projection of a 35mm slide showing a bookcase in Snow's studio with a tape-recorded narration by the artist that discusses various objects within the image. Not only addressing viewers directly, Snow's narration attempts to direct our eyes toward specific portions of the image, as if spectatorial vision could function in a manner analogous to camera vision.

Using concert footage of the free-improvisation ensemble he co-founded in 1974, Snow digitally weaves together images and sounds from performances that have taken place across the globe. 'I desired an equivalence of seeing and hearing so that one could actually listen, pay attention to the music, as well as follow the picture development,' writes Snow. Only the music remains unedited, unmodified.

A cutout of a woman's silhouette is displayed in many locations while a free jazz soundtrack is heard. The jazz musicians later pose for the camera in a studio.

To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playing — as the camera arcs past and over them (the replete set of positions recalls La région centrale’s movements). Brown abraded the film stock, creating a continuous dynamic surface-effect tension with the comparatively static views and cueing the soundtrack, the crackle of fire. The physics and chemistry of combustion were the scientific focus of Lavoisier, the 18th-century savant.

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.

A shorter, significantly altered version of Wavelength (1967), where the original film is overlayed upon itself.

A loop of two parts of a film, superimposed on top of one another, that concern a man who has arrived at the house of his lover and her husband to hang a painting on their wall.

Little Walk (1964) is Michael Snow’s first gallery film installation. It arrives as a diplomatic envoy from New York’s art and film worlds of the sixties – an alternative cinema informed by Minimalism and Happenings, materializations of art as experience projected on Snow’s trademark Walking Woman. "Little Walk" is a dynamic, 12-min silent loop that embodies the experimental nature characterizing the artist's works during that decade. From 1961 to 1967, Snow centred his artistic endeavours across all mediums around the naturalistic outline of a youthful woman. Initially crafted from a cardboard cut-out, the walking woman's image evolved into both the instrument and focal point of Snow's creative expression. "Little Walk," was created for an exhibition curated by Jonas Mekas called "Expanded Cinema." Originally captured on 8mm film, the piece has since been transferred to DVD.

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

Puccini Conservato uses a CD, a sound recording of some Puccini music (from La Bohème). The source of the sound (the loudspeakers) in a continuous hand-held panning (guided by the music), is intercut with shots of flowers or wood-fire, exemplifying the lyricism in Puccini’s music. By being a recording of a recording, the work proclaims the artificiality of the sound. However the beauty and humanity of the music comes through too.

A man (Snow himself) rises from his desk, puts on his scarf and coat, says goodbye to a woman typing at a nearby desk, and leaves the room.

You see nothing but a white, crystal white plate, and water dripping into the plate, and you hear the sound of the water dripping. The film is ten minutes long.

Experimental short in which a camera pans quickly in a small apartment space; Disembodied voices speak of audience engagement.

Although Seated Figures is characteristically confined by a specific placement of the camera — in this case, fixed to the rear of a pickup truck and aimed at the ground — the result is one of Snow's most visually compelling films. As Snow drives the truck over all kinds of terrain — he has offhandedly described the film as a "history of roads" — we see a variety of textures flowing in front of the camera as this road movie unfolds: asphalt, gravel, dirt roads, sand, grass, flowers and shallow creeks. The imagery moves between abstraction and representation as different travelling speeds affect the legibility of the visuals, and as manmade surfaces give way to the beautifully variegated patterning of nature.

Watch slides of Michael Snow's paintings from the worst seat in the house.

Solar Breath (2002) is a 62-minute loop of fluttering curtains that reveal and conceal an idyllic landscape in rural Newfoundland.

A cross-hatched fantasy about nocturnal furniture love.

A dual-projection film where each director made 30 minutes of film without knowledge of what the other was making. Snow's side is a visual encyclopedia of natural and man-made objects. Brown's side transforms footage of a San Francisco cable car.

Zooming back from an image in close-up a brightly colored and kitschy room is revealed. Digitally manipulated objects and figures appear/disappear, details and colors change in scale, and intensity, sexes change. The Living Room digitally dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of On/Off and/or Absence/Presence. The Living Room is also part of the longer feature Corpus Collosum.

"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Walking Woman. My worst film."

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

English and French words flash individually over a black background.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room.

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room.

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

From La Région Centrale (1971), Snow orchestrates new patterns of movement that exchanges the focus on landscape with the cityscape of Toronto.

A new performance that reworks the 1967 film’s sine wave soundtrack into a new composition distributed across multiple channels of sound in real time.​​

A loop of two parts of a film, superimposed on top of one another, that concern a man who has arrived at the house of his lover and her husband to hang a painting on their wall.

Two 16mm films are projected in a loop on a thin painted aluminum screen hanging in the middle of a room. We can hear the projectors at each end of the room, which project images on the central screen. We can see the same scene on each side of the screen: a woman, seen from the front and front back depending on the side of the screen, painting it with spray paint. A man then tears up the screen and goes through it, followed by the woman. We can see Michael Snow sitting further away, giving instructions to the woman. We can also see the cameras filming the scene from each side. Visitors in the room can walk around the screen and thus watch the scene from one angle or another. Both films are projected in synchronicity on the two sides of the screen.

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World belongs to a 35-hour film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Toronto-based Bruce Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of religious texts intended to help preserve the spirit of the departed in the afterlife — but in Elder’s reading, that comforting idea of continuity takes on a rather darker cast. Lamentations is comprised of a complex audio and visual patchwork: a philosophical meditation superimposed as text throughout the film; vignettes featuring a comical but disturbing Franz Liszt, a debate between Isaac Newton and George Berkeley, an angry, deranged man in an alley, and an arrogant psychiatrist; and a final search for salvation in the forests of British Columbia, the American Southwest, and Mexico’s Yucatan.

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

A rare film shot in Super 8 by Michael Snow in 1984 that is almost unseen: an exercise in improvisation in which Snow plays the piano with one hand while filming with the other.

As the wheel turns, the religion of the body moves to and through the physical into the psychological. We see the feared, all is moved. There is a hint of seclusion, an idea from the past re-worked and still dangerous. The participants unsure choose a convent and are still revealed. Through a window there appears a tree, and then a forest. Too many options. The monastic life, safe and sure. We cluster for the cloister.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.