Oooh I’m gonna watch Wavelength sometime soon! I’ll bump this thread when I do.
I saw it when it was originally released and was most impressed. Snow weds fairly straightforward drama to to pur visual/auditory experience.
<—> and “La Region Centrale” are purely visual, but his masterpiece “Rameau’s Nephew By Diderto(Thanx to denis Young) By Wilma Schoen” is a whole epic lot of things.
So Is This is hilarious.
What is your perception of Michael Snow and are his films appreciated or underappreciated?
As well know as experimental cinema is. Which is not much at all.
Do people understand his style of filmmaking which is in my opinion both obscure and outlandish?
The general public seems to hate it. At a 2004 screening of Wavelenght at a museum in Puerto Rico the audience (mostly middle age upper class women) complained loudly throughout the film. Seen the same thing happen as a student in film school screenings in the early 80s in NYC.
For instance is an underrated film such as Wavelength privy to your own interpretation of cinema or is it distant?
Very close. I see Wavelenght as a narrative film, it is interesting because it pushes the boundaries of film narrative as much as Joyce did to the novel,.
PS
La Region Centrale is one of Cinemas crowning achivements.
I have only seen Wavelength (in my top 10 ever) and Corpus Callosum (a brilliant film), and I would heartily agree that Michael Snow is underappreciated. Especially now that the likes of Brakhage and Framptom (both excellent filmmakers) have much higher profiles due to their respective Criterion treatments. In comparison to those two peers of his, yes, Michael Snow is underappreciated. But then again, so are James Benning, Peter Tscherkassky, Phil Solomon, Peter Hutton, etc…
A student doing her master’s thesis at a school in Eastern Canada actually published her thesis, entirely on the film Wavelength, in book form (and I was lucky enough to find it at a local bookstore). This validates Wavelength as being an important, groundbreaking, and worthwhile film, yet it’s all too common to hear lazy, middlebrow cinephiles take a reductive approach to Wavelength, and dismiss it as a pretentious, onanistic exercise in experimental cinema. Sadly, I’ve only been able to see Wavelength watching it online (it’s not a very high quality version). It’s probably the number one film I would like to experience in a movie theatre eventually.
I really want to see La Region Centrale; I reckon I should have got it from Karagarga before they banned me.
I went to a screening of Wavelength many years ago (when I was back in high school), and I’d say it still holds the record for most walkouts of any movie I’ve ever been to (though a Navajo-English-subtitled screening of Film Socialisme recently came close). After the screening was over I overheard someone say to his friend, “All those people who walked out missed the point: this is a movie to be endured.”
Not sure this anecdote answers the question at all except to say that Snow’s films still have the potential to baffle contemporary audiences. Another point you might glean from this story is that I knew who Michael Snow was in high school, so surely he can’t be that underappreciated, though I’m pretty sure I was familiar with his work only because of a copy of James Monaco’s How to Read a Film that I found on my mom’s bookshelf (likely a college textbook she had never sold back).
I’m not an academic or anything, so I’m just speculating here, but it seems like the structuralist filmmakers as a whole aren’t talked about so much anymore. Perhaps this is a byproduct of the death of film?
Sam Fickling
What is your perception of Michael Snow and are his films appreciated or underappreciated? Do people understand his style of filmmaking which is in my opinion both obscure and outlandish? For instance is an underrated film such as Wavelength privy to your own interpretation of cinema or is it distant?