Corpus Callosum, Michael Snow
Michael Snow was an experimental filmmaker fascinated by disappearance in infinite detail, by disorientation in the infinitely large. He pushed back the limits of cinema without formalizing it too much, as much concerned with forms (as an accomplished visual artist) as with sounds (he was an experimental musician with a sweet spot for free jazz). The Cinémathèque québécoise has preserved some of his key film, such as La région centrale, which we are about to show you.
The “Corpus Callosum” is a central region of tissue in the human brain which passes messages between the two hemispheres. “Corpus Callosum” the film (or tape, or projected light work) is constructed of, depicts, creates, examines, presents, consists of, and is betweens. Between beginning and ending, between natural and artificial, between fiction and fact, between hearing and seeing, between 1956 and 2002. It’s a tragi-comedy of the cinematic variables. “Corpus Callosum” juxtaposes or counterpoints a realism of normal metamorphosis (two extreme examples: pregnancy, explosions) in believable, real interior spaces with impossible shape changes (some made possible with digital animation). First the camera, then we in the audience, observes the observations of the real people depicted in the obviously staged situations. What we see and what they see is involved in shifting modes of belief. There seem to be (though there is no narrative) a Hero and Heroine. However, from scene to scene they are different people costumed identically or altered electronically. The sound electronic like the picture is also a continuous metamorphosis and as the film’s nervous system, is as important to the film as the picture. Or: the sound and the picture are two hemispheres joined by the artist. “Corpus Callosum” is resolutely artificial; it not only wants to convince, but also to be a perceived pictorial and musical phenomenon. (Michael Snow) This is structural film meets digital technology. “Corpus Callosum” uses the high-end film animation software “Houdini” developed in Canada and used in the films “The Titanic” and “Apollo 13”, the engineers won a techical Oscar for its development. This is the first usage in an experimental film. (CFMDC)
Michael Snow
Born in Toronto in 1928, Michael Snow studied at the Ontario College of Art. His abstract paintings were first exhibited in 1957. During the 1950s he also worked in the studios of animator George Dunning. After moving to New York with his first wife, the artist Joyce Wieland, he returned to figurative painting and diversified his practice as a visual artist, photographer and finally filmmaker. In 1967, his film Wavelength immediately established him as a key figure in experimental cinema. In the early 1970s, he returned to Canada and shot La région centrale, another of his major works, in northern Quebec. A resolutely multidisciplinary artist, Michael Snow was also an accomplished jazz pianist and improvisational musician.
