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Movies are supposed to move, stupid. Nobody can do a movie with still images.Thirty years after hearing his childhood friend utter these words, Chris Marker made La jetee (1962), a seminal science fiction film constructed almost entirely from still photographs. After its release, avant-garde directors became increasingly interested in challenging the hegemony of movement in cinema. Two filmmakers in particular would become the chief exponents of the cinema of stasis. One is Andy Warhol. His film Sleep (1963) features an immobile nude man sleeping for five and a half hours, while Empire (1964) consists only of a static shot of the Empire State Building that is held for over eight hours. The other is Michael Snow.The first artwork that comes to everyone's lips when Snow's name is mentioned is Wavelength (1967), an undisputed classic of experimental cinema which pairs an escalating sine wave with a very slow 45-minute zoom from one end of a room to the other. While Wavelength's canonical status is well deserved, the film's fame has unfortunately tended to overshadow many of the other remarkable entries in Snow's oeuvre (which consists not only of films but also of paintings, photographs, sculptures, and jazz music). In particular, one of the most under-theorized elements in Snow's aesthetic is his fascination with stasis. In some of his films, movement is kept to a bare minimum (e.g. Dripping Water [1969], co-directed with his wife, Joyce Wieland, in which the only movement portrayed is water dripping into a dish). In other Snow films, however, there is no on-screen movement whatsoever. One Second in Montreal (1969) consists only of photographs; Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film (1970) offers only paintings; and A Casing Shelved (1970) is simply a color slide of a bookshelf accompanied by Snow's voice describing the items on it. (Some critics have even questioned whether or not A Casing Shelved should be considered a film, since it offers no potential for movement. Of course, if one adopts a more Wittgensteinian approach to defining cinema, one can certainly see the 'family resemblances' between this work and more conventional films.) And one of Snow's most idiosyncratic static films is So Is This (1982), in which individual words appear on screen, one at a time, forming jocular self-referential sentences. Since I was interested in learning more about Snow's static films (especially So Is This) and the aesthetic that gave rise to them, I conducted an interview with Snow via e-mail. Our correspondence took place between October 201 1 and March 2012.Justin Remes: While many film theorists have seen motion as a necessary condition of cinema, many of your films challenge this view. What underlies your interest in cinematic stasis?Michael Snow: The basis of cinema as a technology is stasis; the fundamental unit is the still photograph. Motion is made from the perception of fast stills.Remes: Noel Carroll has argued that A Casing Shelved should not be considered a film, since it offers no possibility of movement. In his view, calling this static work a film would turn family albums into cineplexes. (Along similar lines, at the moment, A Casing Shelved is noticeably absent from your filmography on Wikipedia.) Do you agree with Carroll on this point? Or do you find his conception of what counts as cinema to be too narrow?Snow: Yes, A Casing Shelved is categorically problematic. However, it is a projection on a screen from a 35mm transparent source. There is no movement on the screen, but the movements of the eyes of the spectator are directed by the sound - my voice. That there is sound, which is a movement in time, is important in considering the works cinema status. The 'movie' is made by the recorded voice guiding the spectator's eyes over the projected image.Also, the experience of duration is unenforceable in gallery moving-image installations, so this work has to be shown in a cinema theatre. …
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