The Collected Writings of Michael Snow

Tap, 1969

42 The Collected Writings of Michael Snow someone to say a man is dead in the room. Did the photograph just happen to be on the wall? Snow: Oh my God no! The wall was set up that way; that's where the zoom was going. I took the photograph myself for the film, but I also made a piece of sculpture using photographs of waves. All those orders of events were classified by me at that time as kindsof events and the kind of effect that they can have. There is the implicationof a story in the sense of human affairs. You can make connections between, say, the two girls listening to the radio and the delivery of the bookcase, maybe it's like a coffee break or something, but that is not the story. There is only one place with a connection to a prior event: her making the phone call refers back in time and space too, because the zoom has gone past that point, to where the body is. It also makes a connection and gives the implication that this thing will continue, so that more will follow, which it does. The photograph of the waves is an implication of a kind of total continuity for everything notjust that simple incident. Sitney: Did you rehearse the telephone call? Did you tell her what to say? Snow: No, that's just one shot. I did tell her what to say and I had to redo the sound. It took me a week to shoot the film. Then it took a little while to put it together, figure out the sound and everything. I had to start shooting in the middle too, which made it a little difficult. Hollis Frampton is the guy who dies, and he could only do it on such and such a day so I had to start the zoom in the middle and make sure that it got back to where it was supposed to be. Ken Jacobs lent me the camera and the Angenieux lens and naturally he did not want me to leave it in my studio. I had to take it apart every time after I finished shoot­ ing. I fixed the tripod but I still had to take the camera off. I shot some nights and some days. I'm delighted the whole thing came out the way I wanted it, including the different kinds of stock. Sitney: What do you call the new film? Snow: No name. But I was thinkingof using that . [The spoken title is Back and Forth.] In the new film I am thinking about some sort of different orientation or emphasis that the spectator has, some kind of different participation. The new one is more objective, I think, than Wavelength and it involves you in some way which I don't know how to describe ­ exactly what your eyes and mind aredoing when you're watching that. Mekas: There is a family of films that you could have some connection to, like Landow's Fleming Faloon. Then, no doubt, some of Andy Warhol's work. Snow: Maybe with Wavelength, but not so much with the new one. In this film there are some interesting things from a time point of view; because the pan is always moving, scanning, that defines your time sense. When there's activity in that room, that just happens and you scan past it and so on. This panning, which is either you or the camera, is continuous(or will be, as you saw it, it's still in a rough shape). There is a paradox involved: the action of the spectator­camera is what is continuous, whereas these other things are going to appear and disappear as the thing passes. It's going to have an inexorablequality. I see the events involved as having some connection with that motion. There are opposites in it; yeses and nos. The one girl who is a student answers a question by shaking her head yes or no; there's a fight and a kiss. On Wavelength 43 There are light changes in it now, as you saw it. I don't want any of that in the final version. I want this to be all velocity changes, to do with speed not to do with the changes of meaning that happen with the light. Mekas: How did you control the borders of the panning camera? Snow: I made a set of baffles...