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An Avant-Garde Legend Comes to Town

Michael Snow, on the far left, at Hallwalls on January 28, 1975. Next to Snow, smoking, is the late Paul Sharits; the late Hollis Frampton is the bearded man second to the right. Sharits and Frampton were professors at UB's Department of Media Study, a co-sponsor of Saturday's screening.

A historic figure of avant-garde filmmaking, the Canadian artist Michael Snow, will present some of his films and videos at Hallwalls on Saturday, October 13, at 7pm.

Let me admit upfront: Trying to summarize Snow’s work and career is a crazy, daunting task. One reaches for comparisons only to immediately come up short. There’s hardly anyone, in film or anywhere else, who has shown the endless aesthetic curiosity and intellectual daring that Snow has brought not just to film but to a dizzying variety of art forms.

Snow started out as a painter and jazz musician. He made his first film, an animated short, in 1956. But it wasn’t until he moved to New York City in the early 1960s and encountered the burgeoning “underground cinema” that his interest in film was truly awakened. In 1967 he made the classic Wavelength, widely considered among the greatest avant-garde films ever produced.

Wavelength, which lasts 45 minutes, consists entirely of a single gradual camera zoom from one end of a room to another. The zoom ends on a close-up of a photograph at the far end of the room. Along the way, the film stock changes, and filters alter the color of the images. Meanwhile, the soundtrack, which is as carefully composed as the image, features first a Beatles song and then a slowly mounting sine wave that crests at the end. There are certain teasing punctuations in the film: A woman walks in and talks on the phone, and a man stumbles in and drops dead. But the camera is utterly unmoved, uninterested in pursuing their stories.

Although Snow seems to have little interest in conventional narrative films, Wavelength can almost be seen as a radical counter-attack on everything that we’ve been taught and told a movie should do. Its plot, if it has one, has to do with the apparatus of the camera and the way it is put to use—with a sense of imaginative freedom and philosophical exploration, and without the alibi of a conventional story. Even 40 years later, Wavelength feels like a huge “paradigm shift” in filmmaking and the limitless creative options open to it.

Triage

When we look at Snow’s creative output, we see a brilliant paradox at work. On the one hand, he is deeply interested in the basic mechanisms of the cinema, unique and specific to the art-form. This formal arsenal includes, among other things, composition, camera movement, cutting, panning, zooming and sound.

On the other hand, being an accomplished musician, painter, sculptor and photographer, Snow’s work is also about the interpenetration of art forms. His films contain thoughtful interplay of sound, sculptural form, painterly effects, and still images. This has the effect of breaking down conventional boundaries between the arts.

At Hallwalls, Snow will be showing three of his works. The Living Room (2000) uses footage that was shot and then manipulated using software. As we watch, the shapes and textures of objects and human beings morph, distort and transform. The film is ingenious in its play and humor but also a tad unsettling. Nothing is fixed; all is subject to unpredictable change.

REVERBERLIN

Triage (2004) is a blind collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown. Their films, both 30 minutes long, are simultaneously projected side by side, each with its own composed soundtrack. Our experience is guided by the sparking of chance correspondences and rhythmic contrasts between the two films. Neither filmmaker knew in advance what the other would be doing, making for a kind of Surrealist “exquisite corpse” game.

REVERBERLIN (2004) features performance footage of an experimental music ensemble that Snow co-founded. But here’s the twist: The images are juxtaposed with sound from other (different) musical performances by the same players. This creates both disconnections and accidental synchronicities between sound and image. It leaves us wondering: How exactly are seeing and hearing related? When we watch a film, is one more dominant than the other? Provoking such fundamental philosophical questions about art and perception is a running preoccupation of Michael Snow’s work.

Snow was the very first visiting filmmaker at Hallwalls more than 30 years ago. His return on Saturday will be part of Beyond/In Western New York. He also has concurrent installations on view at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.