Michael Snow
Michael Snow was considered one of Canada's most important artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explored the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompassed film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprised a thorough investigation into the nature of perception.
While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich.
At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engaged in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality. He died on January 5th, 2023.
Known For | Directing |
---|---|
Most Rating | 0.537 |
Birthday | 1929-12-10 |
Place of Birth | Toronto, Canada |
Also Known As | 마이클 스노우, |
1968
Snowblind
4.8/6
"Homage to Michael Snow's environmental sculpture 'Blind.' The film proposes analogies, in imitation of three historic montage styles, for three perce...
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Snowblind
1969
Seminar
0/0
An unreleased diary film shot during the Fairleigh-Dickinson Artist Seminar simultaneous to the production of Back and Forth by Michael Snow.
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Seminar
1996
Michael Snow Up Close
6/1
MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The...
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Michael Snow Up Close
1985
Home Movies 1971-81
0/0
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
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Home Movies 1971-81
1972
Dream Life
4/2
Two twenty-something women dream of the ideal man and slowly realize that reality is very different from their fantasies.
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Dream Life
1971
Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)
6.4/30
Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plat...
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Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)
1974
‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen
7.9/7
Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.
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‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen
2011
Michael Snow Portrait
0/0
Hand processed 35mm portrait of Michael Snow.
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Michael Snow Portrait
2019
L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow
0/0
This is the sound recording of the interview that Michael Snow, filmmaker, sculptor, photographer and visual artist, gave to Gérard Courant for the ma...
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L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow
1965
Short Shave
0/0
"Vanity. Had a beard. Appearance (looks). Looking. Disappearance act. Hand-made fades and zooms but camera made shave. Camerazor. Handsome. Tired. Wal...
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Short Shave
1983
Snow Business
0/0
Interview and profile of experimental filmmaker Michael Snow from 1983. Includes extracts from 'Back and Forth', 'Wavelength', 'La Region Central', 'S...
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Snow Business
1987
I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
5/3
This is an interesting little documentary about the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, which was apparently one of the global hotbeds of experimen...
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I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
2016
Portrait of Snow
0/0
A serendipitous encounter with a younger artist gives legendary Canadian art icon Michael Snow the opportunity to reflect on his life and career.
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Portrait of Snow
2013
Snow In Vienna
0/0
World renowned artist and filmmaker Michael Snow continues to push the boundaries of yet another field, music. The avant-garde greats mastery of free-...
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Snow In Vienna
1997
Birth of a Nation
6.3/3
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
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Birth of a Nation
1978
Cinématon
4.3/6
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 y...
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Cinématon
2011
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
6.7/10
Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up a...
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Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
1978
Grand Opera: An Historical Romance
8/4
Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of even...
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Grand Opera: An Historical Romance
1966
Manual of Arms
5/18
In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activitie...
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Manual of Arms
1967
Bill's Hat
0/0
"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’...
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Bill's Hat
2012
A Lecture
0/0
This performance piece by filmmaker Hollis Frampton, recorded in 1968 in New York City, features the voice of artist Michael Snow. Frampton would plac...
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A Lecture
1963
Toronto Jazz
6/1
Toronto is regarded as the third largest jazz centre in North America. This film features a cross-section of jazz bands of that city: the Lenny Breau...
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Toronto Jazz
1968
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
7.4/23
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1970
The Stone Age
0/0
"The question is, it is either going to be a stoned age or a new Stone Age" - Louis Brigante
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The Stone Age
1979
Cinématon V
0/0
Reel 5 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
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Cinématon V
2016
EXPRMNTL
0/0
Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Fest...
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EXPRMNTL
1979
Cinématon n°44 : Michael Snow
0/0
Portrait of Michael Snow
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