Michael Snow
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.
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
as SelfAn epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Movie pageFree Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
as HimselfExperimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking...
Movie pageCinématon
as N°44Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the...
Movie pageHapax Legomena I: Nostalgia
as NarratorMichael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the...
Movie page‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen
as The Whistler / The Trumpeter / Man at the Table / ... (voice)Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.
Movie pageDream Life
as uncreditedTwo twenty-something women dream of the ideal man and slowly realize that reality is very...
Movie pageEXPRMNTL
as HimselfKnokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice...
Movie pageHome Movies 1971-81
as uncreditedHome movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Movie pageManual of Arms
as uncreditedIn this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his...
Movie pageBirth of a Nation
as SelfFilmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Movie pageThe Stone Age
as Aristotle"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante
Movie pageToronto Jazz
as HimselfToronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a...
Movie pagePortrait of Snow
as HimselfA serendipitous encounter with a younger artist gives legendary Canadian art icon Michael Snow...
Movie pageA Lecture
as NarratorThis performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features...
Movie pageI Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
as uncreditedThis is an interesting little documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which...
Movie pageSnowblind
as uncredited"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in...
Movie pageMichael Snow Up Close
as HimselfMICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major,...
Movie pageSnow Business
as HimselfInterview and profile of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow from 1983. Includes extracts from...
Movie pageBill's Hat
as uncredited"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat –...
Movie pageL’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow
as HimselfThis is the sound recording of the interview that Michael Snow, filmmaker, sculptor,...
Movie pageShort Shave
as uncredited"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms...
Movie pageSnow In Vienna
as Himself - ComposerWorld renowned artist and filmmaker Michael Snow continues to push the boundaries of yet another...
Movie pageCinématon n°44 : Michael Snow
as uncreditedPortrait of Michael Snow
Movie page