Movies: Michael Snow

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s....

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, cha...

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each...

Michael Snow narrates a series of Hollis Frampton's photographs (speaking as Frampton, in the first person)—as each picture catches fire on a hot plate....

A 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. Shot in the Canadian mountains over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm....

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades....

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community....

In this "fourteen-part drill for the camera," Frampton created a portrait gallery of his art-world friends engaging in a variety of ordinary activities....

A surreal and comic exploration of an office space and its inhabitants and the decorations of a living room....

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image....

English and French words flash individually over a black background....

A silent succession of black-and-white photographs of the city of Montreal....

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival W...

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World belongs to a 35-hour film cycle, The Book of All the Dead, which comprises the bulk of Toronto-based Bruce Elder’s filmmaking from 1975 to 1994. In ancient Egyptian culture, the Book of the Dead consisted of...

A cutout of a woman's silhouette is displayed in many locations while a free jazz soundtrack is heard. The jazz musicians later pose for the camera in a studio....

Two twenty-something women dream of the ideal man and slowly realize that reality is very different from their fantasies....

To Lavoisier Who Died in the Reign of Terror (1991) is a collaboration with filmmaker Carl Brown, who specializes in homebrewed chemical film development. In a series of tableaux, people perform everyday tasks — sleeping, dining, reading, card-playin...

Two 16mm films are projected in a loop on a thin painted aluminum screen hanging in the middle of a room. We can hear the projectors at each end of the room, which project images on the central screen. We can see the same scene on each side of the sc...

A continuous zoom traverses the space of a breakfast table, serving as a grand metaphor for indigestion....

A camera moves back and forth at an increasing pace. Back and forth, back and forth......