Michael Snow
BiographyMichael Snow is a painter, sculptor, photographer, filmmaker, and musician. He was born in Toronto in 1929. After studying at the Ontario College of Art (1948 - 52), Snow worked for Graphic Films, a small Toronto film company, during which time he produced his first independent film. In 1956, he held his first solo exhibition at the Isaacs's Gallery. From 1962 to 1972, Snow, along with his wife at the time, Joyce Wieland, lived in New York City. There, he became heavily involved with the New American Cinema Group, a self-help organization founded by Jonas Mikas and 23 other filmmakers.
Snow’s films explore the possibility of the filmic medium, and often investigate the nature of perception. In 1967, he created his most famous and influential work, Wavelength. The film is infamous for its 45-minute fixed frame camera zoom, and remains one of the most studied and revered works of structuralist filmmaking. Snow's other films of this period similarly explore the mechanics of filmmaking as an investigation into the nature of perception. The main subject of his film Standard Time (1969) is the formal aspects of a camera’s panning and tilting movement. |
FilmographyA to Z (1956)
New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) Short Shave (1965) Standard Time (1967) Wavelength (1967) Back and Forth (1969) Dripping Water (1969) * One Second in Montreal (1969) Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film (1970) La Region Centrale (1971) Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) Breakfast (Table Top Dolly) (1976) Presents (1981) So Is This (1982) Seated Figures (1988) See You Later - Au Revoir (1990) To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) The Living Room (2000) Prelude (2000) Corpus Callosum (2002) WVLNT (2003) Triage (2004) SSHTOORRTY (2005) Reverberlin (2006) Puccini Conservato (2008) * with Joyce Weiland |