Michael Snow

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

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

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

A loop of two parts of a film, superimposed on top of one another, that concern a man who has arrived at the house of his lover and her husband to hang a painting on their wall.

Commissioned by the Toronto International Film Festival to mark the event's 25th anniversary in September 2000, the "Preludes" program consisted of ten short films by Canadian directors which were inspired in some way by the festival. Each film screened as a prelude to a feature film in the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival program. The full "Preludes" anthology was screened on the web in November 2000, and was given theatrical retrospectives at the TIFF Lightbox in the subsequent years.

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

In a Lower Manhattan industrial loft, a camera very slowly zooms into a photograph on a wall while various people occasionally enter and exit.

A loop of two parts of a film, superimposed on top of one another, that concern a man who has arrived at the house of his lover and her husband to hang a painting on their wall.

A loop of two parts of a film, superimposed on top of one another, that concern a man who has arrived at the house of his lover and her husband to hang a painting on their wall.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

A dual-projection film where each director made 30 minutes of film without knowledge of what the other was making. Snow's side is a visual encyclopedia of natural and man-made objects. Brown's side transforms footage of a San Francisco cable car.

Panning shot of a room while a group of people discusses film while eating at a table.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm.

A shorter, significantly altered version of Wavelength (1967), where the original film is overlayed upon itself.

A camera moves back and forth at an increasing pace. Back and forth, back and forth...

A cutout of a woman's silhouette is displayed in many locations while a free jazz soundtrack is heard. The jazz musicians later pose for the camera in a studio.

The apparent vertical scratch in celluloid that opens Presents literally opens into a film within the film. When its figure awakens into a woman in a 'real' unreal set, the slapstick satire of structural film begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the whole set, in this first of three material 'investigations' of camera movement. In the second, the camera literally invades the set; a plexiglass sheet in front of the dolly crushes everything in its sight as it zooms through space. Finally, this monster of formalism pushes through the wall of the set and the film cuts to a series of rapidly edited shots as the camera zigzags over lines of force and moving fields of vision in an approximation of the eye in nature. Snow pushes us into acceptance of present moments of vision, but the single drum beat that coincides with each edit in this elegaic section announces each moment of life's irreversible disappearance.

Puccini Conservato uses a CD, a sound recording of some Puccini music (from La Bohème). The source of the sound (the loudspeakers) in a continuous hand-held panning (guided by the music), is intercut with shots of flowers or wood-fire, exemplifying the lyricism in Puccini’s music. By being a recording of a recording, the work proclaims the artificiality of the sound. However the beauty and humanity of the music comes through too.

From La Région Centrale (1971), Snow orchestrates new patterns of movement that exchanges the focus on landscape with the cityscape of Toronto.

Two 16mm films are projected in a loop on a thin painted aluminum screen hanging in the middle of a room. We can hear the projectors at each end of the room, which project images on the central screen. We can see the same scene on each side of the screen: a woman, seen from the front and front back depending on the side of the screen, painting it with spray paint. A man then tears up the screen and goes through it, followed by the woman. We can see Michael Snow sitting further away, giving instructions to the woman. We can also see the cameras filming the scene from each side. Visitors in the room can walk around the screen and thus watch the scene from one angle or another. Both films are projected in synchronicity on the two sides of the screen.

You see nothing but a white, crystal white plate, and water dripping into the plate, and you hear the sound of the water dripping. The film is ten minutes long.

A continuous zoom traverses the space of a breakfast table, serving as a grand metaphor for indigestion.

Experimental short in which a camera pans quickly in a small apartment space; Disembodied voices speak of audience engagement.

Solar Breath (2002) is a 62-minute loop of fluttering curtains that reveal and conceal an idyllic landscape in rural Newfoundland.

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal.

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room.

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room.

A new performance that reworks the 1967 film’s sine wave soundtrack into a new composition distributed across multiple channels of sound in real time.​​

Watch slides of Michael Snow's paintings from the worst seat in the house.

Using concert footage of the free-improvisation ensemble he co-founded in 1974, Snow digitally weaves together images and sounds from performances that have taken place across the globe. 'I desired an equivalence of seeing and hearing so that one could actually listen, pay attention to the music, as well as follow the picture development,' writes Snow. Only the music remains unedited, unmodified.

To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playing — as the camera arcs past and over them (the replete set of positions recalls La région centrale’s movements). Brown abraded the film stock, creating a continuous dynamic surface-effect tension with the comparatively static views and cueing the soundtrack, the crackle of fire. The physics and chemistry of combustion were the scientific focus of Lavoisier, the 18th-century savant.

"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Walking Woman. My worst film."

English and French words flash individually over a black background.

English and French words flash individually over a black background.

Michael Snow's 1970 film A Casing Shelved combines a projection of a 35mm slide showing a bookcase in Snow's studio with a tape-recorded narration by the artist that discusses various objects within the image. Not only addressing viewers directly, Snow's narration attempts to direct our eyes toward specific portions of the image, as if spectatorial vision could function in a manner analogous to camera vision.

Although Seated Figures is characteristically confined by a specific placement of the camera — in this case, fixed to the rear of a pickup truck and aimed at the ground — the result is one of Snow's most visually compelling films. As Snow drives the truck over all kinds of terrain — he has offhandedly described the film as a "history of roads" — we see a variety of textures flowing in front of the camera as this road movie unfolds: asphalt, gravel, dirt roads, sand, grass, flowers and shallow creeks. The imagery moves between abstraction and representation as different travelling speeds affect the legibility of the visuals, and as manmade surfaces give way to the beautifully variegated patterning of nature.

A man (Snow himself) rises from his desk, puts on his scarf and coat, says goodbye to a woman typing at a nearby desk, and leaves the room.

Zooming back from an image in close-up a brightly colored and kitschy room is revealed. Digitally manipulated objects and figures appear/disappear, details and colors change in scale, and intensity, sexes change. The Living Room digitally dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of On/Off and/or Absence/Presence. The Living Room is also part of the longer feature Corpus Collosum.

A cross-hatched fantasy about nocturnal furniture love.

Little Walk (1964) is Michael Snow’s first gallery film installation. It arrives as a diplomatic envoy from New York’s art and film worlds of the sixties – an alternative cinema informed by Minimalism and Happenings, materializations of art as experience projected on Snow’s trademark Walking Woman. "Little Walk" is a dynamic, 12-min silent loop that embodies the experimental nature characterizing the artist's works during that decade. From 1961 to 1967, Snow centred his artistic endeavours across all mediums around the naturalistic outline of a youthful woman. Initially crafted from a cardboard cut-out, the walking woman's image evolved into both the instrument and focal point of Snow's creative expression. "Little Walk," was created for an exhibition curated by Jonas Mekas called "Expanded Cinema." Originally captured on 8mm film, the piece has since been transferred to DVD.