The experimental works of Michael Snow and other experimental film-makers require the viewer to be of a certain intellect. The films to be fully understood and appreciated should be placed within the context of art history, and more specifically modernism.
Michael Snow is one of the best film-makers in his league. He is one of the worlds two most highly acclaimed experimental film-makers alongside Stan Brakhage.
Michael Snow is not only a film-maker but he is also a highly accomplished visual artist, musician, writer, Sculptor, and composer. He is one of Canada's best-known living artists.
Michael Snow was born in 1929 in Toronto. He studied at the Ontario College of Art and had his first solo exhibition in 1957. Since then his work has appeared at exhibitions in every major art centre in Europe and North America, and his films have been shown at film festivals in the United States, Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, France, Austria and Italy.
Stan Brakhage in Cat's Cradle.
English: A portrait of Jonas Mekas, shot at the Fo...
Stan BrakhageAs an artist Michael Snow does not like to conform to what we would call 'normal' in film-making and his other arts.
"imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure in perception. How many colours are there in a field of grass to a baby unaware of 'Green'? How rainbows can light create for the untortured eye?... Imagine a world before 'the beginning was the word.'" Stan Brakhage 1963.
With inspirational words like these, most of the experimental film-makers were trying to ask exactly the same questions in their films, film-makers such as Michael Snow. Why should he have to conform to normal cinema standards for his films, if...