When Michael Snow passed away on January 5 at the age of 94, the world lost a tremendous artist, who worked with rigor and humor in film, music, photography, sculpture, and more.
His classic film Wavelength hasn’t played in Los Angeles for several years, so we are bringing it with two other short films, Standard Time (1967) and See You Later (1990) all screening on 16mm.
An accomplished cross-disciplinary artist even before he came to cinema, Michael Snow was perhaps best known for his highly influential avant-garde films, which remain as brazenly conceptual as they are perceptual. After moving to New York City with his wife Joyce Wieland in the 1960s, the two were exposed to the burgeoning New American Cinema movement, where Snow became part of an emerging tradition of medium-specific and highly formalist approach to avant-garde cinema—often described as “structuralism”—and made a series of groundbreaking films that are still among the most widely discussed and debated in the American avant-garde. The act of watching Snow’s work is perhaps best described by P. Adams Sitney, who calls it the “discovery of a simple situation permeated by a rich field of philosophical implications, which duration elaborates”. Yet Snow’s work also contains “a persistent undercurrent of humour that can range from dryly witty to pure slapstick” (Chris Kennedy).
“Mr. Snow was a prolific and playful artist, as well as a polymath of extraordinary versatility. “I am not a professional,” he declared in a statement written for a group show catalog in 1967. “My paintings are done by a filmmaker, sculpture by a musician, films by a painter, music by a filmmaker, paintings by a sculptor, sculpture by a filmmaker, films by a musician, music by a sculptor.” And, he added, “Sometimes they all work together.” — J. Hoberman, New York Times, 2023-01-06 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/arts/michael-snow-dead.html
16mm prints courtesy of Canyon Cinema. Special thanks to Chloe Reyes and Seth Mitter (Canyon Cinema).
