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spectator to
think
about the relationship between the two parts. All I could say to him was, "The relationship between the two parts is a splice." How
do
they relate? How are they part of the same organism? The point is that there are
a lot
of answers.
MacDonald: So Is This
has been very useful for meespecially in thinking about the relationship of film experience and film criticism. Film criticism is almost always considered to be a
written
text about a
visual
experience. But there's an inevitable gap between what writing can communicate and the multi-dimensional experience of film. It strikes me that a lot of what passes for complexity in writing about film is interference that results from the inability of the word to really come to grips with the visual/auditory experience of film.
So Is This
is about these issues; it turns film onto language in the way that language is normally turned loose on film.
Early in the film you pay homage to independent filmmakers who have used text in inventive ways: Marcel Duchamp, Hollis Frampton, Su Friedrich. . . . Had you been thinking about working with text for a long time or did the recent spate of this kind of work inspire you?
Snow:
I wrote the original part of that text around 1975 and made the film almost ten years later. It came out of the text for the Chatham Square album [
Michael Snow: Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder,
Chatham Square, 1975] and out of
One Second in Montreal,
as another way of controlling duration. Since then, I've been asked whether I knew Jenny Holzer's work, but I didn't at that time. The things she's done have some relationship, although there's no timing involved in her work, as far as I can tell.
MacDonald: So Is This
is poetic justice for people who make a fetish of the ability to write and read sentences. Is that what you had in mind?
Snow:
That's part of it, yes. Another thing is the business of using the art object, in this case film, as a pretext for arguments that the writer considers of more interest. That's valid in some senses, but sometimes it seems like a misuse of the stimuli, the film. It's as if you're producing these things for other people to advance their own interests and arguments.
MacDonald:
The way in which text is used in
So Is This
makes a comment on language-based approaches to film. The formal design of showing one word at a time with the same margins, regardless of the size of the word, results in the little words being large, which of course grammatically they often are in the language, and the big words being much smaller. This is precisely the opposite of what a lot of academic writing does. At academic conferences, using complex vocabulary often becomes a performance.
So Is This
seems to critique that kind of linguistic performance with a different kind of performance.