Last night I went to Brown University to watch the Modern Culture and Media screening in 16mm of Michael Snow's legendary experiment. I braced myself to stay through to the end (with a brief rest-room hiatus) and I made it, along with five others of the original twelve. I clocked the film at 194 minutes.
I found the movie particularly fascinating when the swirling, swinging, fluctuating, mountain-top images suggest not the real world but a kind of fragmented and almost abstract visual painting in motion. I'm not saying I enjoyed all of it, but I was fascinated by what Snow was doing in his one-of-a-kind tour-de-force and was drawn to the enormous variation he employed with the robot camera. If this were a piece of classical music rather than a film, its form would be that of theme and variations.
Particularly effective, I thought, was the use of sounds: beeps, vibratos, repeated motifs, which at one point sounded like a phone ringing in another room. They contributed to the mesmeric quality of the experience.
The swirling ending was really really really long and excessive, and by that point I had had enough and just wanted it to end, but in fact it is this very excess that gives the film its uncompromising strength.
This is a natural for DVD, where one could more comfortably watch it in bite-size segments, but then, purists might suggest, one would be deprive of the cumulative effect.
I found the movie particularly fascinating when the swirling, swinging, fluctuating, mountain-top images suggest not the real world but a kind of fragmented and almost abstract visual painting in motion. I'm not saying I enjoyed all of it, but I was fascinated by what Snow was doing in his one-of-a-kind tour-de-force and was drawn to the enormous variation he employed with the robot camera. If this were a piece of classical music rather than a film, its form would be that of theme and variations.
Particularly effective, I thought, was the use of sounds: beeps, vibratos, repeated motifs, which at one point sounded like a phone ringing in another room. They contributed to the mesmeric quality of the experience.
The swirling ending was really really really long and excessive, and by that point I had had enough and just wanted it to end, but in fact it is this very excess that gives the film its uncompromising strength.
This is a natural for DVD, where one could more comfortably watch it in bite-size segments, but then, purists might suggest, one would be deprive of the cumulative effect.