La région centrale

We pay homage to Canadian artist Michael Snow, a towering figure in the world of avant-garde cinema, who died at the age of ninety-four in January ­2023. Snow remained uncategorizable as an artist during a career that encompassed painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, filmmaking, installation, and music – he created groundbreaking works in many of these media.

Gravity is destroyed … the horizon line has been erased and forgotten and the land mass has been transformed into a whirling flat disc, a blurred flash of light with no mass or volume, rotating wildly through the sky …. Snow’s mountain landscape has become a reflection on the solar system.

Snow used a camera apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, filmed in a deserted region, without the least trace of human life: a sort of plateau without trees, opening onto a vast circular prospect of the surrounding mountains. Progressively, the space fragments, vision inverts in every sense, light everywhere dissolves appearance. We become insensible accomplices to a sort of cosmic movement. A sound track, rigorously synchronized, supplies a permanent counterpoint.