So Is This

Canada

1983

43 Min

Color

Silent

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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ED Michael Snow

Berlinale (Forum)

Synopsis

“SO IS THIS parlays an elegantly simple concept into an unpredictable, cumulatively rich experience.

“The film is a text in which each shot is a single word, tightly-framed white letters against a black background. Compared to Snow’s recent epics … it seems almost a throwaway but it’s also the most satisfying film he’s made in a decade

“With formalist belligerence, SO IS THIS threatens to make its viewers ‘laugh cry and change society,’ even promising to get ‘confessional.’ Although the film does reflect Snow’s personality – his Canadian-ness, preference for humor over irony, obsession with art world chronology (who did what first) – its only confession is the tacit acknowledgement that he’s sensitive to criticism. Snow takes full advantage of his film’s system of discourse to twit restless audiences. A lot of this is pretty funny but SO IS THIS is more than a series of gags. Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?) that has been going on sporadically for 60 years.

“If you let it, Snow’s film stretches your definition of what film is – that’s cinema and SO IS THIS.” —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

Director

Michael Snow

Michael Snow is best known for his influential 1967 film Wavelength, which remains one of the landmarks of structuralist cinema. Already an accomplished musician, sculptor, painter, and photographer in his native Canada when he became interested in film after moving to New York in the early ‘60s, he saw filmmaking as a natural extension of his other artmaking activities. His first film, New York Eye and Ear Control, incorporated the “Walking Woman” figure he had already employed in a series of widely-exhibited paintings and sculptures.
His subsequent films investigate the medium’s formal possibilities and are often structured on the mechanical properties of the camera itself. Wavelength is organized around a 42-minute zoom across a New York City loft. His next film, Back and Forth, is built around continuous horizontal and vertical pans across a classroom. These experiments reached their logical extreme with La Région Centrale, for which he built a computer-controlled apparatus… read more

Michael Snow is best known for his influential 1967 film Wavelength, which remains one of the landmarks of structuralist cinema. Already an accomplished musician, sculptor, painter, and photographer in his native Canada when he became interested in film after moving to New York in the early ‘60s, he saw filmmaking as a natural extension of his other artmaking activities. His first film, New York Eye and Ear Control, incorporated the “Walking Woman” figure he had already employed in a series of widely-exhibited paintings and sculptures.
His subsequent films investigate the medium’s formal possibilities and are often structured on the mechanical properties of the camera itself. Wavelength is organized around a 42-minute zoom across a New York City loft. His next film, Back and Forth, is built around continuous horizontal and vertical pans across a classroom. These experiments reached their logical extreme with La Région Centrale, for which he built a computer-controlled apparatus which could move the camera in any direction at any speed and set it up in the Canadian wilderness north of Montreal.

Snow was never particularly interested in movies while growing up and his approach to filmmaking reflects an experimental impulse unburdened by cinematic tradition. Much of his work focuses on film’s effects on perception. One Second in Montreal forces the audience to confront their own perception of time and duration by presenting a series of landscape photographs for varying lengths of time. ’Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen improvises on the possibilities of synch sound for more than four hours and See You Later/Au Revoir uses slow motion to create an elegant study of movement. Though he remains known in the United States primarily for his contributions to avant-garde film, Snow has continued to work in other media throughout his career. In Canada, he is equally well-known for his painting and sculpture, and was even commissioned to make the monumental sculptures that adorn Toronto’s Skydome stadium. —allmovie guide

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