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immerses the audience for three hours ten minutes in an experience halfway between a landscape film and an amusement park ride. The epic "
Rameau's Nephew" by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen
(1974) uses a set of individual filmic actions to explore as many variations on the concept of synch sound as Snow could imagine.
Presents
(1980) compares different ways of composing film imagery with a moving camera. In
So Is This
(1982) Snow uses a grid of one printed word per shot to develop a fascinating exploration of the distinctions between reading a text and experiencing a movie.
Seated Figures
(1988) is a landscape film made up of repeated tracking shots of landscapes filmed from a camera looking vertically down from a position a few inches from the ground. And in
See You Later/Au Revoir
(1990) extreme slow motion transforms Snow's standing up and walking out of an office into a gorgeous motion study. Together, Snow's films provide one of avant-garde film's most elaborate critiques of cinematic convention. They are an inventive and productive artist's revenge on film habit.
While Snow remains known primarily as a filmmaker in the United States, he has continued to demonstrate that he is, above all, an
artist
for whom the cinematic apparatus is one of many sets of tools with which art can be made. Even during his most prolific years as a filmmaker (19641974), Snow maintained his interest and productivity in other media, and in intersections between media. The confrontation of audience expectations and assumptions so important in
Wavelength
and other films remains central in
The Audience
(1989), a set of sculptures commissioned by Toronto's new Skydome stadium: the individual characters in the two groupings of representational figures (baseball fans) confront the patrons entering the arena in a variety of provocative ways.
I spoke with Snow in Montreal twice, in early June 1989 and in late May 1990. The two sessions were combined into a single discussion.
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MacDonald:
I want to start with
The Audience
. My guess is that people who know you solely or primarily as an avant-garde filmmaker will say the Skydome gargoyles are something new for you. I can even imagine somebody saying, "Oh, another formalist filmmaker selling out." And yet, on many levels, the gargoyles are in keeping with work you've done all along. From very early in your career, you've been drawn to the public arena and to the idea of confronting expectations. A central premise of the "Walking Woman" paintings, sculptures, and