A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

(1980) compares different ways of composing film imagery with a moving camera. In

So Is This

(1982) Snow uses a grid of one printed word per shot to develop a fascinating exploration of the distinctions between reading a text and experiencing a movie.

Seated Figures

(1988) is a landscape film made up of repeated tracking shots of landscapes filmed from a camera looking vertically down from a position a few inches from the ground. And in

See You Later/Au Revoir

(1990) extreme slow motion transforms Snow's standing up and walking out of an office into a gorgeous motion study. Together, Snow's films provide one of avant-garde film's most elaborate critiques of cinematic convention. They are an inventive and productive artist's revenge on film habit.

While Snow remains known primarily as a filmmaker in the United States, he has continued to demonstrate that he is, above all, an

artist

for whom the cinematic apparatus is one of many sets of tools with which art can be made. Even during his most prolific years as a filmmaker (19641974), Snow maintained his interest and productivity in other media, and in intersections between media. The confrontation of audience expectations and assumptions so important in

Wavelength

and other films remains central in

The Audience

(1989), a set of sculptures commissioned by Toronto's new Skydome stadium: the individual characters in the two groupings of representational figures (baseball fans) confront the patrons entering the arena in a variety of provocative ways.

I spoke with Snow in Montreal twice, in early June 1989 and in late May 1990. The two sessions were combined into a single discussion.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

MacDonald:

I want to start with

The Audience

. My guess is that people who know you solely or primarily as an avant-garde filmmaker will say the Skydome gargoyles are something new for you. I can even imagine somebody saying, "Oh, another formalist filmmaker selling out." And yet, on many levels, the gargoyles are in keeping with work you've done all along. From very early in your career, you've been drawn to the public arena and to the idea of confronting expectations. A central premise of the "Walking Woman" paintings, sculptures, and

Page 54

Gargoyles in Snow's sculpture,

The Audience

 (1989), gesture down

at those entering Toronto's Skydome Stadium.

mixed media pieces was that they were located all over New York (and later other places), so that peoplemostly people who hadn't planned on looking at or thinking about artwould be running into them. And, of course, film is a public arena, too. Your early films were powerful interruptions of what audiences had come to expecteven from what was then called "underground film." They remind me of the old gesture in Hollywood films of slapping people across the face to bring them out of a daze. When Pat [Pat O'Connor, MacDonald's wife] and I were driving in on the expressway the other day, our eyes were immediately drawn to the gargoyles (this is before I realized that the new work you had mentioned on the phone wasn't a film). Out of the whole panorama of the Toronto skyline we were noticing these funny things hanging out of the Skydome. Everything else is rectangles and planes, so this interruption in the city's geometry can't be ignored. Even at a considerable distance, the gargoyles confront the spectator. So, for me, this new piece seems very closely related to your early work.

Snow:

I think that's really true. The big departure in the new piece for some people, at least people who know my sculpture and gallery work, is that it's figurative. I haven't done that before, except with

The Walking Woman,

but

The Walking Woman

had a whole other kind of premise. In 1953 1 did a painting called

Colin Curd about to Play

. It was one of my first big oil paintings. Colin Curd was a flute player I had met. The

Page 55

painting shows this person and a group of people, faces. It's rather Paul Klee-ish. The focus of the painting is the relationship between the audience and the artist or the audience and the work.

There's also some early sculpture, which people would generally call abstract, that includes the spectators. There's

Scope

[1967], which was originally shown in New York in the late sixties. Actually, it's one of a series of sculptures I've continued. They're framers and directors of the spectator's attention.

Scope

is kind of a giant periscope on its side, an illusory straight ahead, made by a couple of right angles. If you look in one end, you see this tunnel andif someone else is looking into the other endanother person at the end of the tunnel. There's also

De La,

a video installation work (owned by the National Gallery of Canada) which uses the apparatus I made to film

La Région Centrale

. The spectators are part of the image.