Image of Michael Snow

Michael Snow

Michael Snow is considered one of Canada's most important living artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explores the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompasses film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprises a thorough investigation into the nature of perception. While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich. At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he has focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engages in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality.


Read bio at tmdb | Read bio at Wikipedia
Born:
Dec 10, 1929 In Toronto, Canada
Movie/TV Credits:
23
First Appeared:
In the movie Toronto Jazz 1963-01-01
Latest Project:
Movie Portrait of Snow 2016-12-23
Known For
Poster of Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
Poster of I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
Poster of A Lecture
Poster of Toronto Jazz
Filmography
Movie Portrait of Snow Himself 2016-12-23
Movie Snow In Vienna Himself - Composer 2013-01-24
Movie Diaries, Notes, and Sketches Self 2013-11-23
Movie Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film Himself 2011-07-24
Movie Sweet Home Alabama Devin 2002-09-26
Movie Birth of a Nation Self 1997-08-06
Movie Forbidden Worlds Thomas (uncredited) (archive footage) 1988-07-07
Movie I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art 1987-01-01
Movie Home Movies 1971-81 1985-01-01
Movie Bad Girls Thomas 1981-10-01
Movie Cinématon V N°44 1979-03-25
Movie Grand Opera: An Historical Romance Wilma Schoen 1978-01-01
Movie Cinématon N°44 1978-12-20
Movie ‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen The Whistler / The Trumpeter / Man at the Table / ... (voice) 1974-11-05
Movie Dream Life 1972-07-22
Movie Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia Narrator 1971-11-20
Movie The Stone Age Aristotle 1970-01-31
Movie Seminar 1969-01-01
Movie A Lecture Narrator 1968-10-30
Movie Bill's Hat 1967-01-01
Movie Manual of Arms 1966-12-31
Movie Short Shave 1965-01-01
Movie Toronto Jazz Himself 1963-01-01