Happy 92nd Birthday Michael Snow! Born today in 1928, this Canadian editor, cinematographer, and director is also an artist who works in a range of media. This includes film, installation, sculpture, photography, painting and music.
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Snow, years later, studied at Upper Canada College and the Ontario College of Art.
In the late 1950s, Snow made the isolated, seven-minute 1956 Canadian animated short 'A to Z'.
Post-graduation, he had his first solo exhibition in 1957. Snow then concentrated on his painting career until moving to New York in 1963.
In the early 1960s, Snow moved to New York with his wife, Canadian experimental filmmaker and media artist Joyce Wieland, where they remained for nearly a decade.
After attending avant-garde film screenings organized by Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist Jonas Mekas, Snow turned out a second film. This was the formalist, thirty-four-minute 1964 Canadian short film 'New York Eye and Ear Control'.
For Snow, his moving to New York resulted in a proliferation of creative ideas and connections, and his work increasingly gained recognition.
Also, in 1964, Snow had the idea to create a film where a camera moved "in every direction and on every plane of a sphere".
During the late 1960s, he created three films that experimented with camera movement: ‘Wavelength' (1967), ‘Standard Time’ (1967), and ‘<--->'. (1969).
Snow also researched machines that could automatically move a camera in complex ways, particularly surveillance devices.
During this time, Snow edited, wrote, shot and directed the film of which he is best known. This was the forty-five-minute 1967 Canadian independent/experimental film 'Wavelength'.
Shot in color over the course of one week, many different techniques were used for constructing and compiling the film together as a whole.
One example would be the slowly panning forty-five minute continuous (but not) single zoom shot throughout.
It is interesting because as these events are played out, the viewer can soon realize that the space in this eighty-foot urban loft is less now than before as the camera continues to zoom further in. Only because the zoom is so trudging that it is unnoticeable.
Snow uses his own style of the zoom to create the illusion of how it creates its own unique facet of time in space over time consisting all in one empty niche, using the jerkily shifting and halting take as the narrative for the film.
The film incorporates in its time frame four human events in the room, including a man's (Hollis Frampton) death and a woman calling emergency later on, is intended to be symbolic of his intent.
Another differing tactic used is when the film reaches the twenty-minute mark, we begin to hear a low humming sound, which eventually becomes a painful ringing as time progresses and the film ends.
Here, Snow uses this certain soundtrack that reinforces the basic formal progression as the zoom magnifies the space ever more distinctly. This "sine-wave" also gives a nod to the title of the film, again a play on words.
The viewer is subjected to the sound of a single sine-wave, ranging from its lowest note (fifty cycles per second) gradually progressing to its annoyingly shrill highest note (twelve thousand cycles per second).
Here, Snow uses this also to intensify the confines of space and surroundings within the apartment loft.
Near the end of 'Wavelength', the shot stops only and comes into perfect focus on a photograph of the sea on the wall.
The film ends with the camera going completely out of focus and fading to white, as the soundtrack finally raises to a pitch too high to be heard.
Snow has stated that his intent with 'Wavelength' was for it to be "a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas."
'Wavelength' was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967. The screening of the film in 1967 was, according to Mekas, "a landmark event in cinema."
Later in 1967, 'Wavelength' won the Grand Prix at the 4th Knokke Experimental Film Festival in Knokke-Le-Zoute, Flanders, Belgium.
Snow’s “diary of a room” was seminal in its articulation of expansive, self-reflexive possibilities for underground cinema. He reflected that “the kinds of belief you can have in the medium” was the very subject of the film.
Indeed, the polymathic artist poses questions concerning nothing less than the relationship between image (a forty-five-minute fixed zoom) and sound (a sine wave that exists in parallel to the visuals rather than representing them).
Snow also poses ideas of permanence and ephemerality, (as evoked through a former industrial loft on Canal Street), and the relationship between abstraction and narrative.
One of the most unconventional and experimental films ever made, 'Wavelength' is a structural film of a forty-five-minute long zoom in on a window over a period of a week in December 1966 and then edited in 1967.
Within the context of the film, the picture is colored, filtered, scratched, double-exposed and/or otherwise manipulated via many different techniques.
'Wavelength' was a sea change—an “eye-opener” of the magnitude of Stan Brakhage’s ('Dog Star Man') hand-manipulated abstractions and Andy Warhol’s ('Vinyl') distancing camera gaze.
In the early 1970s, Snow returned to Canada as "an established figure, multiply defined as a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a musician."
Structural film was an experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Today, 'Wavelength' is considered a canonical avant-garde film that nevertheless contributes to a reputation for being a difficult work.
This goes along with other filmmakers of the genre as well. Most notably, these include Brakhage, Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Maya Deren ('Meshes of the Afternoon'), and Kenneth Anger ('Scorpio Rising').
Given the durational strategy of 'Wavelength', we feel every minute of the time it takes to traverse the space of the loft to get to the infinite space of the photograph of waves—and the fade to white—at the film's end. The film inspires as much boredom and frustration as intrigue and epiphany.
'Wavelength' is often listed as one of the greatest underground art house and Canadian films ever made. It was named #85 in the 2001 Village Voice critics' list of the 100 Best Films of the 20th Century.
In 1971, American art critic Annette Michelson remarked that the camera zoom in 'Wavelength' harkens to the storytelling of comedies, Westerns, and gangster films; through a sequence of “human events” ranging from a furniture move to a sudden death.
Also, that same year, Snow directed the 1971 Canadian experimental documentary film ‘La Région Centrale.
The film is three hours long and was shot from September 14-20 using a robotic arm, and consists entirely of preprogrammed movements. Wieland served as one of the cinematographers.
‘Le Région Centrale' is composed of seventeen shots of an uninhabited mountainous landscape. Between each take, the screen is black with a white X in the center.
In the beginning, the camera moves to capture its surroundings with slow, continuous gestures. Over the course of the film, the movement crescendos as the camera spins rapidly.
Snow's work has appeared at exhibitions across North America, South America and Europe. They were displayed in Paris, France in 2000 and later at the MoMA in Manhattan, New York City, New York in 2005.
Snow's films have premiered in film festivals worldwide. Five of his films have premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).
In September 2000, TIFF commissioned Snow, along with fellow Canadian filmmakers David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan ('The Sweet Hereafter'), to make a series of short films. These were collectively titled 'Preludes', and were screened for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the festival.
Two years later, Snow directed the 2002 Canadian experimental drama/independent film '*Corpus Calossum'. It was later screened at the Toronto, Berlin, Rotterdam, and Los Angeles film festivals, amongst others.
In January 2003, Snow won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Douglas Edwards Experimental/Independent Film/Video Award for '*Corpus Callosum'.
Later that same year, Snow released the fifteen-minute 2003 Canadian short film 'WVLNT: Wavelength For Those Who Don't Have the Time'.
This was a shorter (one-third of the original time) and significantly altered version by overlaying multiple forms of the original film upon itself.
In the 2012, for the British monthly film magazine Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, 'Wavelength' ranked 102nd. It also received three directors' votes. Today, Snow is considered one of the most influential experimental filmmakers.
Snow traces the dualistic structure of his work to his Canadian upbringing between two cultures—English and French—and his early awareness of the different qualities of sight and sound, learned from his parents.
His extensive and multidisciplinary oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, video, film, sound, photography, holography, drawing, writing, and music.
Show's work explores the nature of perception, consciousness, language, and temporality.
Regardless of genre, Snow’s work engages with the visualization of consciousness, temporality, and language and consistently investigates the nature of perception.
Today, he is regarded as one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers, having inspired the Structural Film movement.
Snow has been active from 1956–present.
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