TO LAVOISIER WHO DIED IN THE REIGN OF TERROR
The subject matter of Snow’s shots tends toward the everyday, the mundane. Each shot is held for a long time, and in most the camera begins a very slow zoom-in. In virtually every one, the surface of the film aggressively asserts itself: the image is at times covered or even obscured with scratches, streaks of various colors, and irregular blotches, and at times the emulsion literally breaks up into multicolored dots or abstract patterns of color, all a result of special film processing by Snow’s collaborator Carl Brown.
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Antoine Lavoisier was an 18th-century French chemist whose work helped lay the foundations of modern chemistry. As all chemists and alchemists before him did, Lavoisier studied the ways in which substances are transformed into other substances. More specifically, he helped develop the idea of certain fundamental chemical elements that cannot be further reduced or divided, and he gave the first accurate explanation of fire and helped develop the general idea that chemical processes do not create or destroy matter but simply transform it. He was also a tax official of the ancien regime who was condemned to death during the Reign of Terror; he was sentenced along with 27 others in a group trial that lasted less than a day, and then immediately guillotined.
The shot of the card game made me think of the paintings of Paul Cezanne, who made cardplayers one of his principal subjects. His cardplayer compositions are utterly unlike this shot, but the tension in his work between image as a record of external reality and image as abstract patterns of paint has informed much of our century’s art, including, if only indirectly, Snow’s.
The surface patterns do introduce one element not present elsewhere in the film, except perhaps in the sound track: their movements are characterized by a certain randomness, the randomness of Brownian motion or of other natural processes like fire. If Snow’s carefully staged compositions and carefully timed zooms are brimming with an artist’s intentionality, the patterns introduce a realm that is outside of the artist’s point-to-point control. Snow got to decide which patterns to include and which to leave out, to be sure, but presumably he didn’t have much control over how the patterns developed or what they look like. The particular patterns couldn’t be applied speck by speck, or frame by frame; their very appearance suggests something not wholly a product of human sensibility.
While I don’t know if the final hand is actually Snow’s, it seems clear that it stands for the artist’s hand, seen at least twice before in the film, cleaning glass and playing the piano. (Incidentally, the reading man who places his hand center screen is Snow’s fellow Toronto filmmaker Bruce Elder.) The artist’s perception, desire, and materials have obliterated the external world, and we are left alone, in a single terrifying moment, with the artist’s hand, the body part through which he does much of his work.
