Michael Snow

Born: 1929-12-10

Michael Snow was considered one of Canada's most important artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explored the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompassed film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprised a thorough investigation into the nature of perception. While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich. At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engaged in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality. He died on January 5th, 2023.


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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

as Self
Released: 1968-03-01

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

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The Stone Age

as Aristotle
Released: 1970-01-31

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

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Toronto Jazz

as Himself
Released: 1963-01-01

Toronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a...

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Manual of Arms

as uncredited
Released: 1966-12-31

In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his...

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Bill's Hat

as uncredited
Released: 1967-01-01

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat –...

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Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)

as Narrator
Released: 1971-11-20

Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the...

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Dream Life

as uncredited
Released: 1972-07-22

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

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Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film

as Himself
Released: 2011-07-24

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking...

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‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen

as The Whistler / The Trumpeter / Man at the Table / ... (voice)
Released: 1974-11-05

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

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I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

as uncredited
Released: 1987-01-01

This is an interesting little documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which...

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Portrait of Snow

as Himself
Released: 2016-12-23

A serendipitous encounter with a younger artist gives legendary Canadian art icon Michael Snow...

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Birth of a Nation

as Self
Released: 1997-08-06

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

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Michael Snow Up Close

as Himself
Released: 1996-01-01

MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major,...

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Snowblind

as uncredited
Released: 1968-09-12

"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in...

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Home Movies 1971-81

as uncredited
Released: 1985-01-01

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

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Short Shave

as uncredited
Released: 1965-01-01

"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms...

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A Lecture

as Narrator
Released: 2012-01-01

This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features...

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L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow

as Himself
Released: 2019-01-14

This is the sound recording of the interview that Michael Snow, filmmaker, sculptor,...

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Snow In Vienna

as Himself - Composer
Released: 2013-01-24

World renowned artist and filmmaker Michael Snow continues to push the boundaries of yet another...

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