Oct. 22nd – Mad Stork Cinema: Two by Michael Snow

The Mad Stork Cinema presents two films by Michael Snow!

New York Eye and Ear Control
34 min / 16mm / sound / 1964
“One of the major achievements of the sixties. Mike Snow postulates an eye that stares at surfaces with such intensity… The image itself seems to quiver, finally gives way under the pressure. A deceptive beginning – silent: a flat white form sharply cut to the silhouette of a walking woman… More Human images, love-making – a Human epic now still ruled by the after image of the “Walking Woman”. As in no other film yet seen, its alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a ‘placement’ of consciousness – the subject matter of the future, really. Human energy on film…”
— Richard Foreman, New York Film Co-op

Wavelength
45 min / 16mm / sound / 1967
WAVELENGTH was shot in one week in December, 1966, preceded by a year of notes, thoughts, mutterings. It was edited and first print seen in May, 1967. I wanted to make a summation of my nervous system, religious inklings, and aesthetic ideas. I was thinking of, planning for a time monument in which the beauty and sadness of equivalence would be celebrated, thinking of trying to make a definitive statement of pure Film space and time, a balancing of “illusion” and “fact,” all about seeing. The space starts at the camera’s (spectator’s) eye, is in the air, then is on the screen, then is within the screen (the mind). The film is a continuous zoom which takes 45 minutes to go from its widest field to its smallest and final field. It was shot with a fixed camera >from one end of an 80 foot loft, shooting the other end, a row of windows and the street …. The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by four human events including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound, music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic sound, a sine-wave …. It is a total glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory which only film and music have to offer.