Untitled - EMAF

AUSSTELLUNG // EXHIBITION
The title is of course the word SHORT printed right on top of the word STORY. This can be seen but can it be said? I wrote the script,
designed the set, directed the shoot and supervised the sound-mix and edit. The staged action was shot, beginning with a camera hold on
the apartment´ inner doors. A man arrives carrying a wrapped-up painting. He is greeted by a woman. He unwraps the painting, shows it
to her. The camera follows them to a central position in the apartment. A dispute develops and the painter smashes the painting he¹s just
brought over the head of the woman¹s husband. The camera follows the painter and the wife/lover back to the door. He exits, she walks
away. There is dialogue, in Farsi, but there are subtitles in English. (…) The film of the above-described scene was cut exactly in half and
the two halves - sound and picture - super-imposed. This makes a simultaneity of actions that occurred ›linearly‹. Before and After
become a Transparent Now. Arrival and Departure are unified. It¹s truly ›filmic‹, one transparent ›film‹ over another. It¹s a ›painting‹
about a painting. I was very concerned with the mobile colour mixing that would eventually happen. Colours were carefully chosen as I
tried to predict how they would mix and interact. I make ›pictures‹ and the experience of looking at them is more important than the
›elsewhereness‹ of a story, even in this my most ›story-telling‹ film. In that respect part of the perception or ›reading‹ of the film involves
ones choices of what went before and what came after in the actual pre-filmic event. (…) There are, literally, layers to it and I believe
that each time one sees ›it‹ one sees it differently. One may concentrate for example, on the moving colour-mixing, or what happens to the
painting or the sub-titles, or the way the speech and music are supered on each other. (Michael Snow, October 2005)
Michael Snow, *1929, Toronto, CDN. He is best known for his influential 1967 film ›Wavelength‹, which remains one of the landmarks
of structuralist cinema. Already an accomplished musician, sculptor, painter, and photographer in his native Canada when he
became interested in film after moving to New York in the early '60s, he saw filmmaking as a natural extension of his other artmaking
activities. His first film, ›New York Eye and Ear Control‹, incorporated the ›Walking Woman‹ figure he had already employed in a series of
widely-exhibited paintings and sculptures. His subsequent films investigate the medium's formal possibilities and are often structured on
the mechanical properties of the camera itself. ›Wavelength‹ is organized around a 42-minute zoom across a New York City loft. His next
film, ›Back and Forth‹, is built around continuous horizontal and vertical pans across a classroom. These experiments reached their logical
extreme with ›La Région Centrale‹, for which he built a computer-controlled apparatus which could move the camera in any direction
at any speed and set it up in the Canadian wilderness north of Montreal. Michael Snow was never particularly interested in movies while
growing up and his approach to filmmaking reflects an experimental impulse unburdened by cinematic tradition. Much of his work focuses
on film's effects on perception. ›One Second in Montreal‹ forces the audience to confront their own perception of time and duration by
presenting a series of landscape photographs for varying lengths of time. ›Rameau's Nephew‹ by Diderot by Wilma Schoen improvises on
the possibilities of synch sound for more than four hours and ›See You Later/Au Revoir‹ uses slow motion to create an elegant study of
movement. In Canada, he is equally well-known for his painting and sculpture, and was even commissioned to make the monumental
sculptures that adorn Toronto's Skydome stadium. (Tom Vick, All Movie Guide)
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