Wavelength
Kanada 1967 — R+B+K: Michael Snow — M: Tom Wolff — D: Hollis Frampton, Lynne Grossmann, Naoto Nakazawa, Amy Taubin, Joyce Wieland — 45 Min. — OF — 16mm
Der erste von drei Kamerafilmen, mit dem Snow schlagartig berühmt wurde. In einer einzigen Einstellung holt ein Zoom langsam die gegenüberliegende Wand eines New Yorker Appartements heran. Veränderungen im Zimmer und Mikro-Ereignisse geben Hinweise auf ein Verbrechen, das sich möglicherweise dort zugetragen hat
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This film is a continuous zoom which takes forty-five minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera from one end of an eighty-foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and a street. Thus, the setting and the action which takes place there are cosmically equivalent. The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by four human events including a death. The sound on theses occasions is sync sound – music and speech occurring simultaneously with an eletronic sound, a sone wave, which goes from its lowest rate to its highest. It is a total glissando, while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum – so the film as a whole attempts to utilize the fifts of both prophecy and memory, which only film and music have to offer. – Michael Snow

<---> (Back and Forth)
Kanada 1969 — R+B: Michael Snow — D: Allan Karpow, Emmet Williams, Max Neuhaus, Joyce Wieland, Luis Camnitzer — 54 Min. — OF — 16mm
Zweiter Kamerafilm, für den Snow erstmals mit einer maschinellen Kameravorrichtung experimentierte. In extrem beschleunigenden, horizontalen Schwenks wird ein Klassenraum gefilmt, wobei die formal strenge Anordnung durch kleine Ereignisse chaotisch unterwandert wird. Eine Stehparty unter Studenten endet in einem Ringkampf, und als die Kamera in den vertikalen Tilt übergeht, beendet ein Polizist das schwindelerregende Treiben.

It’s a classroom, and it’s built first on left-to-right and right-to-left continuous pans with the camera on a tripod. It starts at a medium tempo, slows down, then gradually picks up speed to very fast; there’s a cut to an up and down pan in the same space at the same high speed then it gradually slows down to a stop. The gesture of BACK AND FORTH is a “yes” or “no” gesture and includes such relationships as teacher/student and male/female. The film is about reciprocities, balances, oscillations. BACK AND FORTH also features something I continue to be involved in which is themes and variations. That’s one of the things jazz has always done and, in another way, that’s what I’ve done in film. – Michael Snow

La région centrale
Kanada 1971 — R+B: Michael Snow — K: Pierre Abbeloos — 180 Min. — OF — 16mm
Dritter Kamerafilm, für den Snow einen Kamera-Roboter entwerfen ließ. Auf einem unberührten Hochplateau in Québec entsteht ein vom Menschen autonomer Film, der in einem 360°-Panorama die menschenleere Landschaft monumental einfängt. In starken Richtungswechseln überwindet die Kamera die Schwerkraft, wäh- rend zusätzlich die Welt von durchdringenden, fremdartigen Signaltönen irrealisiert wird. Science Fiction auf 16 mm.

I started to think about exterior spaces and arrived at the idea of making a landscape film that would be a true film, not an imitation of painting. It seemed that what would be properly derived from the idea of doing something outside was camera movement in a totally 360-degree space. I spent almost a year looking for someone who could solve this and finally found Pierre Abbeloos. He built a machine to my specs in the sense that I told him what kind of motions and speeds it should be capable of and that it had to be operable through remote control. I didn’t want anything made by humans, because the peopling of space should occur in your mind. I didn’t want buildings, because that would be a human form and I wanted the camera to make the form. – Michael Snow

Presents
Kanada 1981 — R+B: Michael Snow — K: Keith Lock, Michael Snow — D: Jane Fellows — 98 Min. — OF — 16mm
Destruktion statt Kreation! Vor einer fixen Kamera wird eine Drehbühne durch enorme Motoren hin- und herbewegt. Während die Richtung abrupt wechselt, geht eine Frau durch die verschiedenen Kulissen des Bühnenbilds, das allmählich wie im Slap- stick zusammenbricht. Der zweite, dokumentarische Teil von PRESENTS erstellt ein kaleidoskopisches Universum: die Welt als mechanische und mediale (Re-)Präsentation.

PRESENTS has something like three different modes in it. There is pushing and streching, the tracking of the set, which because of convention you think of as camera movement, but you can see that the set is moving, then there is the smashing up of the set, followed by almost an hour of hand held pans which are from all over the world. Each one of the pans is a different reaction to the scene with the camera. So that if the camera was moving in one way you might follow it or if the shape was round you would shoot it in a round way. One of the things I wanted to do was to cut each pan so that there would be no continuity from shot to shot. So they were isolated in time and space as these little instants taken from life. – Michael Snow

So Is This
Kanada 1983 — R+B: Michael Snow — 43 Min. — OF — 16mm
Es werde Wort! In seinem Lesefilm setzt Snow Wörter dem Bildkader gleich und rhythmisiert sie. Er verwickelt den Zuschauer in einen perfiden Dialog, verlangt nach Interaktion und zieht sich in die – filmische und semantische – Selbstreferentialität zurück. Gemäß dem berühmten Satz von Magritte bleibt festzustellen: Ceci n’est pas un film!

A silent film of 45 minutes consisting of single words of this script or score placed on the screen one by one, one after another, for specific lenghts of time. It’s just words; it’s a written text, but the style is conversational, as if you’re sort of blabbing to someone. I think it says that acutally, “It’s just between you and me.” Several different strategies were employed on timing words/passages of the film. Image quality changes too, and the situation of an audience reading a film is a special one, not to be duplicated by reading this. I was trying to catch most of the “this” words as I filmed, trying to make new arragements. Again, it’s a theme and variation thing; a new elaboration of what’s already been stated. – Michael Snow

*Corpus Callosum
Kanada 2002 — R+B: Michael Snow — K: Harald Bachmann, Robbi Hinds — D: Jacqueline Anderson, Greg Hermanovic, John Massey, Kim Plate, Tom Sherman — 92 Min. — OF
Digitale Videoarbeit, in der Menschen und Gegenstände in einem Großraumbüro Transformatio- nen und Metamorphosen ausgesetzt werden. Die sich stetig wandelnde Welt ist mit einer grundsätzlichen Unsicherheit versehen; Überwachungs- kameras und die Allgegenwart von Computern beinhalten die medialen Bilderwelten, in die unsere Welt übergegangen ist.

The corpus callosum is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes “messages” between the two hemispheres. *CORPUS CALLOSUM, the film (or tape, or projected light work), is constructed of, depicts, creates, examines, presents, consits of, and is, “betweens”. Between beginning and ending, between “natural” and “artificial”, betweeen fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It’s a tragicomedy of the cinematic variables. *CORPUS CALLOSUM juxtaposes or conterpoints a realism of normal metamorphosis (two extreme examples: pregnancy, explosions) in believable, “real” interior spaces with “impossible “ shape chages (some made possible with digital animation).  – Michael Snow