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Michael Snow‌

Gender

Male

Birthday

calendar1929-12-10

Popularity

star0.5

Michael Snow

Toronto, Canada

Michael Snow

Toronto, Canada

Gender

Male

Birthday

calendar1929-12-10

Popularity

star0.5

Biography

Michael Snow was considered one of Canada's most important artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explored the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompassed film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprised 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 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 engaged in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality. He died on January 5th, 2023.

Movie Credits

Snowblind

Snowblind‌
star4.8
calendar 1968

Seminar

Seminar‌
star0.0
calendar 1969

Michael Snow Up Close

Michael Snow Up Close‌
star6.0
calendar 1996

Home Movies 1971-81

Home Movies 1971-81‌
star0.0
calendar 1985

Dream Life

Dream Life‌
star4.0
calendar 1972

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)

Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia)‌
star6.4
calendar 1971

‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen

‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen‌
star7.9
calendar 1974

Michael Snow Portrait

Michael Snow Portrait‌
star0.0
calendar 2011

L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow

L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow‌
star0.0
calendar 2019

Short Shave

Short Shave‌
star0.0
calendar 1965

Snow Business

Snow Business‌
star0.0
calendar 1983

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art

I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art‌
star5.0
calendar 1987

Portrait of Snow

Portrait of Snow‌
star0.0
calendar 2016

Snow In Vienna

Snow In Vienna‌
star0.0
calendar 2013

Birth of a Nation

Birth of a Nation‌
star6.3
calendar 1997

Cinématon

Cinématon‌
star4.3
calendar 1978

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film‌
star6.7
calendar 2011

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance

Grand Opera: An Historical Romance‌
star8.0
calendar 1978

Manual of Arms

Manual of Arms‌
star5.0
calendar 1966

Bill's Hat

Bill's Hat‌
star0.0
calendar 1967

A Lecture

A Lecture‌
star0.0
calendar 2012

Toronto Jazz

Toronto Jazz‌
star6.0
calendar 1963

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches‌
star7.4
calendar 1968

The Stone Age

The Stone Age‌
star0.0
calendar 1970

Cinématon V

Cinématon V‌
star0.0
calendar 1979

EXPRMNTL

EXPRMNTL‌
star0.0
calendar 2016

Cinématon n°44 : Michael Snow

Cinématon n°44 : Michael Snow‌
star0.0
calendar 1979

Tv Credits