News arrived this morning of Michael Snow’s passing at age 94. With it came deserved, customary notices of Snow’s genius: his capacity to rework film form with what seemed little more than a careful turn of the camera and distortion of the sound mix, a transmission between artist and audience that I wouldn’t even say few equaled because, in truth, few even thought to try.
It is, of course, often the case that an avant-garde artist’s work rests in harder-to-reach places—archives, museums, 16mm prints only screened in major cities—rendering their passing a more complicated affair. But Snow is a marvelous exception for the wealth of material readily available on YouTube, and in commemoration of his death it seemed right to point any curious parties towards personal favorites.
A key thing about Michael Snow is that he was very funny. Wavelength, on paper, suggests experimental cinema’s preoccupations and aggressions to the nth degree—more than once is it simply, wrongly described as “45 minutes of a slow zoom across a room”—yet couples the most stirring, purely transcendent Beatles cue in cinema with Hollis Frampton walking into the frame so he can just drop fucking dead. So Is This, maybe my favorite, might suggest a demented Sesame Street segment; *Corpus Callosum is rightly treated as a rubicon-crossing in film-to-digital, and also matches delightfully horrible VFX with BOI-OING-OING sounds. And no Snow appreciation would be complete without <—> (you can just call it Back and Forth). Even as—like La Region Centrale—its effects are diffused outside a theater the experience remains overwhelming.
Though all of these require a bit of attention and prudence (e.g. watching on a decent set free from wireless distractions), if one simply—as you’ve no doubt heard about a-g cinema before, but in this case rings especially true—gives themselves over to their oddities, possibilities, and where the two might meet, Snow’s films are akin to opening a third eye.