Film Screening + Filmmaker Q&A:

Wavelength (1967) + So Is This (1982)

-- Q&A to follow with director Michael Snow!

Related event -- Fri Feb 17 @ 7pm in CARR 103:

Public lecture/presentation by Michael Snow: “Michael Snow Photo-Centric: His photographic work.”

Visit also: Condensation (A Cove Story) - a video installation by Michael Snow (Feb. 13 - Mar. 3, Installation Array, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse).

Condensation (A Cove Story) is a time-lapse composition of what happened to the weather between the camera and distant cliffs and seashore over a period of several days.

Wavelength

(Michael Snow, 1967, 45 min, Canada/USA, in English, Color, 16mm) 

Wavelength, Michael Snow's meditation on cinematic practice, takes the form of a zoom that moves from the end of an 80-foot urban loft to a photograph of waves on the wall at the opposite end of the room. The zoom is accompanied by a sine wave as it gradually progresses from its lowest note (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000 cycles per second).

At the beginning of the shot, most of the room is visible. Eventually, the zoom excludes the rest of the room as it focuses on four vertical double windows, three intervening sections of wall space, and a desk, radiator and chairs by the opposite wall. As the zoom progresses, it goes through a series of jerks and jolts between occasional shot changes. Meanwhile, the image passes through a variety of color filters, film stocks, degrees of processing (positive and negative) and light exposures.

At different points in the film, four events occur involving people, during which the sine wave is combined with synchronous sound. Prior to the third event, there are sounds of glass breaking, wood splintering and footsteps on the stairs -- a man staggers in and drops to the floor just before the zoom eliminates him from view. In the last event, a woman makes a telephone call, explaining that a man appears to be dead on the floor. After she leaves, superimposed images of her conversation and earlier stages of the zoom's progress appear over the principal image. As the zoom moves onto the lowest of three small photographs on the central wall, a police siren is heard, gradually merging with the sine wave. The zoom continues beyond the borders of the photograph, then retreats a little and the image blurs out.

Michael Snow's first major film was described by the critic Jonathon Rosenbaum as "the most consequential zoom shot in the history of cinema." 

-- Winner of Grand Prix at Knokke Experimental Film Festival (1967)!

“Thirty-five years after its inception, Wavelength remains one of the most vital and (still) groundbreaking films in the history of experimental cinema.” – Off Screen

“Wavelength ranks among those films which force viewers, regardless of how they react, to carefully consider the essence of the medium and, just as unavoidably, reality.” – Amos Vogel, film critic

So Is This

(Michael Snow, 1982, 43 min, Canada, Silent, Color, 16mm) 

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, the film is a text in which each shot is a single word, tightly-framed white letters against a black background. Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language and enters the contemporary debate about film being or not a language.

“...extraordinary as Michael Snow’s new film is, it’s best described briefly - the better to keep its surprises intact...Snow manages to de-familiarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?), that has been going on for 60 years...he creates a visual dynamo that loses nothing in motion for its absence of pictures.” - J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“A delightful film, full of humour and sentience, it is also an odd film: a text-film, a silent black-and-white talky in colour, a self-reflexive document and a fictive construct, a non-movie that paradoxically fulfills and subverts the implications in the titles of such books as ‘The Language of Cinema’ and ‘How to Read a Film’... by a filmmaker of subtle genius.” - Michael Ethan Brodzky, Arts Canada

Cost: Free and open to the public.

Sponsors: The Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies (AAHVS), the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image (AMI), the Council for North American Studies, and the Masters of Fine Arts in Experimental and Documentary Arts (MFA|EDA).