FILMS BY MICHAEL SNOW
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An impressive trio of Snow’s most recent films, showing at Chicago Filmmakers this Saturday, reveals his entertaining engagement with the weighty ideas of life and death, time and truth. Unlike the purposely difficult movies with which avant-garde filmmakers usually address these subjects–movies that often end up proving only that a little bit of theory is a dangerous thing–Snow’s films prove that a little bit of film can be a powerful tool in the hands of a philosopher.
His latest film, See You Later/Au Revoir (1990), achieves a quasi-theological impact. A mundane half-minute event is slowed down to an 18-minute meditation loaded with dread. Using a super-slow-motion video camera designed for highlighting sports action, Snow shot himself getting up from a desk, putting on an overcoat, exchanging farewells with a woman who’s typing, and walking out the door. The result is reminiscent of Proust’s novels, in which protracted descriptions of everyday incidents run for pages and pages. Proust pushed narrative conventions of time and action. Snow’s miniature plot advances with supernatural deliberation–the film is simultaneously a still life and an odyssey.
Seated Figures (1988) is a more abstract pursuit of similar themes. The title refers to the audience. The sound track seems to come from the projectionist’s room; it keeps track of what’s going on behind the people who are in their seats staring ahead at the screen (or what’s going on in their midst when the projector is in the same room). In Snow’s Wavelength a few human activities intimate an obscure human drama; in Seated Figures some voices, mixed with the projector’s noise, suggest a gathering of people doing something like watching a lengthy abstract silent film. In fact, the sound track begins on the leader, with a voice mentioning the title and Snow’s name, saying it is a silent movie made in 1988. Coughing and yawning can be heard. Later a baby cries, and a muffled conversation in French can be overheard.
