Issue 3: Spring 2009
MICHAEL SNOW IN INTERVIEW
Andrea Monti and Philippe Dijon de Monteton
The following interview with Michael Snow, one of the most significant figures in the history of experimental film and one of Canada’s major contemporary artists, was conducted in August 2007 on the occasion of a major retrospective of his work at the Lucca Film Festival.
Venetian Blind (1970)
What is Cinema? How do you define it?
Cinema is modulated (or shaped) light projected on a flat surface. Cinema was the first medium to make it possible for the artist to control the duration of projected, shaped light forms. So cinema is also shaping durations.
What is your approach to making art? What are the main impulses that drive your creativity?
I’m a traditionalist in that I want to continue, expand upon and add to what has made art important in the past. I want to see something that I’ve never seen before (that’s impossible but, oh well!) and I wish to share that new experience with others.
One thing seems to lead to another. I tend to work from ‘ideas’ but when these ideas-for-the-making-of-objects actually become objects, of course they are very different from ‘ideas’. I work with the physicality of mediums, my work isn’t ‘conceptual’. When the object exists and is successful (to me) I learn from what I have done and that influences a new work. I’m a formalist.
How do you come to work with such a diverse range of media? And how do your experiences using different media feed into one another?
I started to play jazz professionally when I was in high school. I became involved with drawing, painting and sculpture when I went to the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. I continued to play music. Then by a wonderful chance someone saw a drawing of mine and decided to hire me to work for him as a film animator. I continued to play music, make visual art and to make films.
I became interested in the latent content of ‘mediums’ in themselves. This became one of the areas of investigation in my Walking Woman works (1961-67).
Is there a set of concerns that links your work in film and music for example? In an Interview with Scott MacDonald you have said that a lot of your work, not only in music, is about "variations within systems" and it seems that a piece like Bach's Goldberg Variations has been important example for you in that context. Could you please expand on that?
Film and music have many different departments in my work. One could say that my films are more oriented to the nature of music than that of the novel or the theatre but in practice my methods to make one or the other can be completely in opposition to each other. In music I have been involved for over 30 years in free improvisation, totally spontaneous playing. However there is no improvisation in my films. They are compositions. But a lot of my music is also composition. Hue, Chroma, Tint is a 20 minute composition in strict notation written for a classical quartet (piano, clarinet, violin and cello). Several of my recordings are not ‘free improvisation’ in any sense, some are studio compositions using multi-track recording as an instrument. For example the 1974 double LP album Michael Snow: Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone and Tape Recorder or Sinoms (1989), a multi-track vocal work, and especially The Last LP (1987) and The Last LP CD (1994) where all the musical parts were played, recorded and mixed by myself.
But also film image-sound relations have been an important part of my work and they, as entities, are ‘compositions’ (Wavelength (1967) and New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) are examples). And then there are some sound installations like Hearing Aid or Diagonale which are gallery ‘compositions’.
I don’t know why but, yes, theme and variations methods have been important to me for a long time. Jazz is a theme and variations music, as is Indian music. Its one of the most natural ways of structuring time, we all do it all the time.
Wavelength (1967)
What interests you about showing your films in a cinema as opposed to showing in a gallery for example? What does the cinema context offer that the gallery doesn't?
Except for Sshtoorrty (2005), which was conceived of as a work that could function well in both a gallery and a theatre, all the films which are shown in the film festival were explicitly made for projection in a cinema-theatre-auditorium. There, the audiences will be seated, there’s a kind of social agreement that they (the audience) will expect that there will be durations of cinematic events, they will expect development over time. There should be a projection booth and a good sound system, all designed for cinema. The historical lineage is primarily with the theater where one watches plays.
I do moving-image and sound works that are explicitly made for the gallery context where the audience is ambulatory, a gallery visit is a promenade. It’s not like going to a concert. Gallery projection works function in the tradition of the viewing of painting and sculpture (where one may, for example, need to walk around an object to examine it). A gallery work should be of interest if only a small amount (time as object) of it is (by choice) apprehended by the spectator.
Which other filmmakers would you consider as having had an important influence on your work and why?
No particular filmmakers have had an important influence on my work. Or, that could be put this way: many filmmakers have influenced me.
Jonas Mekas had the most influence, not only because of his fine films but especially for his passionate promotion of ‘Experimental Film’. In 1961 I moved to New York with my then wife, Joyce Wieland who I had met when we were both working, learning about and doing animation at Graphic Films in Toronto. We were both interested in filmmaking and had made films (just to make a film) apart from our work at the film company.
In New York we soon became aware of Jonas Mekas column in the Village Voice and started to attend the many screenings that he organized (as The Filmmakers’ Cinematheque) at many different theatres in New York.
We saw many films. During the sixties we saw for example good films by Piero Heliczer, George and Mike Kuchar, Marie Menken, Storm de Hirsch, Shirley Clarke, Jud Yalkut, Barry Gerson, Tony Conrad, Stan Vanderbeek, Peter Kubelka, Bruce Baillie, Andy Warhol, Scott Bartlett, Stan Brakhage, Stan Lawder, Howard Guttenplan, Robert Breer, George Landow and of course several fine artists who became our friends: Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Paul Sharits, Andrew Noren.
Joyce, who made some wonderful films, is dead now but I think she would agree that the above filmmakers (and certainly others that don’t come to mind immediately) influenced us.
In his brilliant article Keaton and Snow Erik Bullot makes a very convincing case of your films being a systematic extension of Keaton's art, most of all in view of your use of burlesque elements. The relationship Keaton-Snow is sort of unexpected at first but then strikes one as absolutely pertinent and revealing. What was your first reaction when you read Bullot's article? Did Keaton's films have such an important impact on you as reading the article may suggest?
When I first read Erik Bullot’s article I was astonished. Because he knows Keaton’s and my films well he is probably correct in seeing resemblances but I knew then and know now very little about Keaton. I am flattered but what I’m doing is in no way ‘an extension of Keaton’s films’. About a year ago as a result of Bullot’s article I saw The General (1927). Both are very good.
In a recent interview with Antoni Pinent you've said that you don't follow very much what's going in the current so-called ‘experimental film’ scene? Why? Are there, nevertheless, any younger filmmakers whose work you find particularly interesting?
It’s true. It’s shameful but I don’t seem to have the time to follow what is happening in Experimental Film. And there are now the art-world filmmakers like Sam Taylor-Wood, Gary Hill or Tacita Dean.
I have too many careers. Two Toronto filmmakers who are not young but do unique work are Peter Mettler and Bruce Elder.
Which of your films do you feel are the most important and why?
I must say that if one of my films is available to be seen by others, I like it.
Back and Forth (1969), La Region Centrale (1971), One Second in Montreal (1969), Rameau’s Nephew… (1974), Presents (1981), See You Later/ Au Revoir (1990), So Is This (1982) are some of my favourites. I think that Rameau’s Nephew… is the best sound film ever made. Oh, and I do like Wavelength a lot.
La Region Centrale (1971) production still
How have your ideas and concerns evolved from your earliest works to the present?
I have a sense of completion in regards to some past areas of interest. I don’t think that I can or will add something new to the group of films that are concerned with camera movement: Presents, Seated Figures (1988), La Region Centrale, Back and Forth, Standard Time (1967), Wavelength, Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976).
But I do see lots more to do with image-sound duration.
I’m not sure how my work has evolved. I’m still working from fundamental principles but I’m also using new technologies.
Sshtoorty has been your most ‘narrative’ work to date. Could you explain your position regarding the use of narrative elements in your films, also in view of the fact that you seemed sort of reticent about using them for so long?
I’ve never had any interest in making narrative films. My interest in film did not come from the movies (which doesn’t mean to imply that what I do is better, it’s just different).
Telling a story is perhaps the best way to structure time but I’m interested in finding different ways for development to take place. If there are ‘narrative cinema’ elements in my films I don’t want them to take you ‘elsewhere’ but to keep you here watching the film, a construct, an artificiality.
In an interview with Scott MacDonald you've said that philosophy is very important to you and also that you think of your work as a kind of philosophy. Which philosophers or theories, if any, have been important to your films?
Plato. I think Wavelength and So Is This could be defined and defended as philosophy.
How do you find the advances in digital technologies, for example, are changing the nature of cinema and the possibilities for artistic expression?
*Corpus Callosum is my first digital work. I commenced working on it in 1983 and didn’t finish it until 2000. I made it because I wanted to use the shape-changing possibilities that digital computer animation made possible and could not be done with film (altering ‘realist’ imagery). *Corpus was shot on d-Beta tape.
Computer programming, the internet and the many new moving image technologies have opened many absolutely new possibilities for artists. Perhaps most important: there is a democratization of the availability of image and sound production or transmission. There is an interesting confusing of the amateur and professional definitions when anybody can use the same technologies.
Do you, like Baudrillard, think the world – because of media - is going towards a complete aesthetization and getting lost in the chaos of information? Or do you find yourself closer to De Kerckhove who believes in a profound and renewed link between the artist and experiments in the field of new technologies, to the effect of a mutual and positive sensory re-configuration of the perception or representation of reality?
Perhaps people in general regard ‘information’ more skeptically than a few years ago. Everybody knows about the ease with which digital imagery can be altered or created.
I agree with De Kerckhove that the new technologies offer the creative artist many new possibilities. I wish I could believe that artistic computer usage would help to cure us human beings of our insane political/religious slaughters but unfortunately it can’t.
How do you judge the increase in works which aim at an increased implication of or interaction with the ‘viewer’ in works of art by means of play mechanisms, for example? And what role does the viewer play in your work?
I have no experience with video games but some of them seem to have amazing effects that invite creativity from the player. Artists could work with that kind of inter-connection.
I was one of the designers of the interactive CD Rom Digital Snow. It’s an encyclopedia of my work but presents, for the user, many different pathways to find information and to make connections on many different levels.
I think that each of my works sets up a different relationship between the viewer and the art work (which is part of the work’s content). There are probably hundreds of such situations, all, I think, different. Some works include the spectators image, for example Scope, a sculpture of 1970, or Video Fields video installation, 2002, or Data, 1972. Spectators are within the work in Blind sculpture of 1970, Hearing Aid sound installation of 1974, or Place des Peaux installation of 2000. The Audience, a giant sculpture on a stadium in Toronto, looks at the real audience.
In September 2006 my most recent public art work was installed in Toronto. It’s entitled The Windows Suite and is a two hour and fifteen minute loop of many very varied sequences which are shown on plasma screens in seven windows on the façade of a new building in downtown Toronto, The Partages Hotel. The sequences are shown continuously every night from 6pm to 3am. One sees the images from the street and the work is permanent, it’s supposed to keep on going forever.
Anyway, this work has a special viewer and image situation that was considered in composing it.
What's the connection between your works and their names? How do you go about choosing the title of a work?
The name of the work is part of the work. I try to find a title that does not explain but that invites one to investigate.
Sshtoorty (2005)
Can a work ever have an end? Is it possible to determine where one work ends and another begins?
The shape of a work and, of course, where it ends are important- if where it ends is important (for example, all my cinema-theatre works). The end of the entire The Windows Suite is not important, although individual sequences have interesting endings. Searching for and finding endings in ensemble free improvisation music is an exciting part of such music.
Recording technologies have made it possible for one to see or hear something again and again so that, in a sense, such works never end. But everything will end, even this paragraph.
We understand that your reading is very wide. What have you been reading lately? Any recommendations?
I would like to read more. I don’t have the time. It took me one year but I recently finished a marvelous book, The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley. It’s an extraordinary attempt to find and describe previously undiscovered or unnoticed connections and influences between Greco-Roman philosophy and that of the “Middle East” and “India”.
What are you working on at the moment and where do you think your work is going?
Right now I’m working on answering your questions. My son and I just finished building a new porch (2m x 4m) on our log cabin (which I constructed but which constantly needs repairs). I chopped some firewood yesterday. Raining today. During the summer I’ve been shooting digital time-lapse images of the changing weather conditions at a nearby inlet with a huge cliff wall. I hope that this will be material for a gallery projection DVD. I have a gadget that controls the frames taken: a frame every 10 seconds or every 20 seconds, or 30 seconds or every hour etc. This will be edited (I hope) to be shown at 24 frames per second or thirty.
I’ve never used time-lapse photography before so (I hope) this will produce new temporal experiences. So I guess that’s where my work is going.
Andrea Monti is a Lucca-based artist, curator, but above all lover. Philippe Dijon de Monteton is a Lucca-grown movie lover.