Michael Snow

Central figure of the American avant-garde. An artist who made an isolated animated short, _A to Z (1956)_ (qv), Snow concentrated on his painting career until moving to New York in 1963. After attending avant-garde film screenings organized by critic-filmmaker 'Jonas Mekas' (qv) and turning out a second film, the formalist _New York Eye and Ear Control (1972)_ (qv), he made the highly influential _Wavelength (1967)_ (qv). WAVELENGTH consists of a 45-minute zoom across a loft--interruped at several points by a cryptic narrative involving a murder--which ends on a close-up of a photograph of ocean waves. The film quickly earned a reputation in international avant-garde circles and inspired a generation of structuralist filmmakers. It was the first in a series of Snow's works which reduce the film medium to one of its most basic elements--camera movement: _Standard Time (1967)_ (qv) is made up of 360-degree pans; in _Back and Forth (1969)_, the camera moves backwards and forwards at varying speeds, recording events in a classroom; in _Die Zentralregion (1971)_ (qv), Snow's remote-controlled camera, mounted on a tripod in the middle of the Quebec tundra, executes 360 degree rotations in three different circular patterns (at various speeds) while zooming in and out.::Daniel Yates <kamerad76@hotmail.com>