Being Michael Snow
Program One
Winner of the Grand Prize at the Fourth International Experimental Film Festival at Knokke-le-Zoute in 1967 and highly influential in its time, Wavelength masterfully conducts us through a filmic exploration of the phenomenology of space and time as it manages to encapsulate both the artist’s autobiography and the aesthetic zeitgeist of its era. The film has often been reduced to a single, structural description: "one room and one zoom." Yet despite Snow's aspiration to work with "pure film space and time," the finished work is all the more remarkable for the array of cultural detritus it incorporates (a Beatles song on the sound track, store signs that dominate the view from his windows), the personal references it contains (works of art, friends and lovers), and even the traces of a murder mystery–cum–Manhattan melodrama.
Made during the heyday of film theory’s infatuation with the textual aspects of the medium and of complex semiotic approaches to the language of cinema, So Is This is a riotously reflexive work that literalizes the concept of film as text: consisting entirely of printed intertitles, it is a silent comedy played out in the minds of each viewer.
One of Snow’s most beautiful works in any medium, See You Later / Au revoir uses a simple slow motion technique to transform a routine workplace into what the artist has described as "a slightly activated Vermeer."