Screening Room: Michael Snow

In March 1977 Michael Snow appeared on Screening Room. He discussed and screened excerpts from his film Rameau s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (10:48/18:57/7:29/0:55). Michael Snow is the dean of structural filmmakers. Whereas the three earlier fims Ñ Wavelength, Back and Forth, and La Région CentraleÑpropose modes of camera movement as modes of cognition, Rameau s Nephew explores the whole human body as a field of epistemological inquiry. Speaking, focusing, singing, urinating, laughing, reading, whistling, flatulating, eating, hand tapping, and fornicating are chief among the types of bodily activity and noise heard and discussed in the film. –P. Adams Sitney Canadian Michael Snow has worked in painting, sculpture, and music as well as film, where he has proved one of the most renowned and influential of all experimental filmmakers. He played a major role in the structural film movement with such works as Wavelength (1967), Back and Forth (1969), and La Région Centrale (1971), exploring the world through deliberate and explicit decisions about formal approaches. Snow has been honored with solo exhibitions or film retrospectives at the Venice Biennale, New York s Museum of Modern Art, the Paris Centre Pompidou and Cinémathèque Française, and elsewhere.