La Region Centrale (Snow, 1971): ICA Cinema, 12.15pm
This 16mm presentation is part of a two days of screenings at ICA Cinema devoted to a titan of experimental cinema, Michael Snow (1929-2023), who produced a body of work that established entirely new ways of seeing.
Chicago Reader review:
Michael Snow’s 1971 film La region centrale is surely one of the most
unusual in the history of the medium. For three hours we see a single
northern Quebec landscape from a single position, with no signs of human
presence save a rare glimpse of the camera shadow. The camera is
mounted on a complex custom-designed machine that takes it through a
series of increasingly elaborate, carefully choreographed movements,
many of which combine several different kinds of rotation. The sound
track consists entirely of a series of beeps that come from the tape
used to control the machine. Clearly, this is not a film for everyone,
but what emerges for the patient viewer is a sense that this rocky,
mostly treeless landscape possesses a vast, timeless, almost visionary
continuity that ultimately transcends the human-designed camera
movements. I have hiked similar Canadian terrain and can testify that
this land has a feeling of being very old, as if barely evolved through
the aeons, a sense well captured by Snow’s film. Few works of art have
so eloquently articulated the difference between the world we were given
and the consciousness we have evolved.
Fred Camper
Here (and above) is an extract.
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