Sculpting Time: An Interview with Michael Snow
Millennium Film Journal, Fall 2012, pp. 16-21
Two filmmakers in particular would become the chief exponents of the cinema of stasis. One is Andy Warhol; the other is Michael Snow. Although the first artwork that comes to everyone's lips when Snow's name is mentioned is Wavelength (1967), one of the most under-theorized elements in Snow's aesthetic is his fascination with stasis. In some of his films, movement is kept to a bare minimum. In other Snow films, however, there is no on-screen movement whatsoever. One of Snow's most idiosyncratic static films is So Is This (1982), in which individual words appear on screen, one at a time, forming jocular self-referential sentences. To learn more about Snow's static films and the aesthetic that gave rise to them, Snow was interviewed via e-mail by Justin Remes between October 2011 and March 2012. The transcript of that interview is presented.
ITEM 2012.054 – available for viewing in the Research Centre
Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited
So Is This (1983) – Michael Snow