Michael Snow: Two Films April 15, 2009

Introduced by Michael Snow.

Canadian artist Michael Snow is one of the most renowned and influential of all avant-garde filmmakers—and a Renaissance man for the 20th century and beyond who has worked in painting, sculpture, and music as well as film. Tonight he introduces a provocative pairing of two of his classics.

The landmark <-> (aka Back and Forth) (1968–69) is one of his most sculptural films, which uses the camera as a perpetual motion machine to examine a classroom and its activities through a series of panning shots of varying velocities. So Is This (1982) unspools its imagery in the form of text—one word at a time—to create a new kind of concrete poetry and film language. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman wrote that the resulting film "parlays an elegantly simple concept into an unpredictably, cumulatively rich experience." (app. 100 mins., 16mm)

Official Website: http://www.wexarts.org/fv/index.php?eventid=3679