*Corpus Callosum (Snow, 2002): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm
This film is part of the 'Not By Lynch' series at the Cinema Museum. Full details here.Not By Lynch: The Lynchian Before and After David Lynch – is a nine-film programme paying tribute to the late David Lynch by exploring films that share aspects of his distinctive style and sensibility. Like any great artist, Lynch not only imprinted his unique vision on the world but also examined it with a discerning eye. The collision between that subjective vision and the objective reality gave rise to what we now call the ‘Lynchian’: a perspective in which everyday reality is a thin veil over a dream-state that feels closer to the truth. While this vision finds its most intense and sustained expression in Lynch’s own films, the Lynchian both predates Lynch and will survive him, so long as the world that inspired it endures. Beginning 16 January 2026 – one year after Lynch’s death – the programme unfolds across nine decades of his lifetime (1940s–2020s), pairing precursors and descendants that echo the moods, methods, and mysteries we call Lynchian. Each screening will be preceded by an introduction and accompanied by an original commissioned essay, produced by Cinema Year Zero. The season is curated by Arta Barzanji.
Chicago Reader review:
I’ve seen Michael Snow’s sprightly experimental feature from Canada,
which showed at a couple of weekend matinees at Facets early last
October, three times in various theaters and many times on video, and
I’ve found it virtually inexhaustible–each viewing has felt like a
brand-new encounter rather than the replay of a golden oldie. Not all of
my colleagues who’ve seen this magnum opus would agree that it’s the
crowning achievement of North America’s greatest living experimental
filmmaker and conceptual artist, but I’m far from alone in my estimation
of this masterpiece. It’s a kind of playful and comic encyclopedia of all the things
digital video can do to stretch, compress, combine, and otherwise
distort human bodies, compiled with neither malice nor anxiety. It
unravels mainly in two contrasting spaces. One is a circular work space
spotted with people at computers and backed by picture windows
overlooking skyscrapers, which the camera glides past in perpetual
motion. The other, viewed from a fixed vantage point, is a windowless
boxlike chamber resembling both a living room and a bomb shelter, where
kitschy objects and members of a nuclear family clustered around a TV
set appear, disappear, explode, reappear, and get scrambled in various
combinations. Snow’s first digital video was in gestation for many years while he
waited for the necessary technology to develop, and since he started out
as an animator (he concludes *Corpus Callosum with his very first piece
of animation), he knows that this kind of patience can sometimes pay
off in unexpected ways. I’ve argued elsewhere that the long-range
working methods of animators may allow them, quite apart from their
conscious intentions, to bear witness to their time in certain respects
more profoundly than live-action filmmakers, who work within much
shorter time frames. Furthermore, the endless possibilities of digital
video, which allow conceptual artists to achieve precisely what they
think, are a boon to someone as focused as Snow, though they’ve
handicapped many less imaginative and original filmmakers by making
their work too easy. The film’s title refers to the tissue that passes messages between the
brain’s two hemispheres. The asterisk, as Snow has noted, means what an
asterisk generally means–a sign pointing toward an extension of the
material. Its addition clearly baffled some; when I reviewed the film
for Film Comment the asterisk got shaved off as if it were a wart, and
the error wasn’t deemed important enough to warrant correcting. Yet the
asterisk points to what I value most about the film, which goes beyond
the kind of formalism usually associated with Snow to meditate on the
ways human bodies have occupied interior spaces over the past half
century. On this very broad canvas, rhymes of shape, costume, decor,
movement, and viewing itself (with functional work-space computers
supplanting kitschy living-space TVs) are combined with contrasting
ideas about how space is represented and negotiated. All of which yields
a kaleidoscopic vaudeville that recapitulates and updates most of the
concerns of Snow’s earlier work–including camera movement, working and
living space, philosophical journeys, and mathematical paradoxes such as
the Moebius strip–while teasing out some of their social implications.
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Here (and above) is an extract.
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