Michael Snow was considered one of Canada's most important artists, and one of the world's leading experimental filmmakers. His wide-ranging and multidisciplinary oeuvre explored the possibilities inherent in different mediums and genres, and encompassed film and video, painting, sculpture, photography, writing, and music. Snow's practice comprised a thorough investigation into the nature of perception. While Snow early established himself as a successful painter and musician in his native Toronto, it was his 1962 move to New York City that marked the beginning of his rise to international prominence. He entered into a long-lasting and fruitful dialogue with downtown Manhattan's artistic avant garde, exchanging ideas with figures such as Yvonne Rainer, Philip Glass, Sol LeWitt, and Richard Foreman, and developing of some of his most ambitious and influential works to date. His 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control documents his growing involvement with the burgeoning free jazz movement, and the soundtrack boasts a lineup that includes Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and Sonny Murray. Snow would continue to pursue improvised music, both on his own and in ensembles such as Toronto's CCMC. The generation and reception of sound in the broader sense emerged as one of his main concerns, reflected in performance and tape works that share qualities with contemporaneous experiments by composers like Steve Reich. At the same time, Snow made alliances within the underground film scene centered around Jonas Mekas' Filmmakers' Cinematheque, an experience that encouraged him to find ways to transfer his concerns with music and photography into the realm of the moving image. He assisted Hollis Frampton on films such as Nostalgia(1971), and it was legendary director Ken Jacobs whose loan of equipment helped Snow create his most famous and influential work, the groundbreaking 1967 film Wavelength. Wavelength, which notoriously includes a 45-minute camera zoom within a fixed frame, remains one of the most studied and admired works of structuralist filmmaking. Other of Snow's films of this period, including Back and Forth (1969) and La Région Centrale (1971) similarly explored the mechanics of filmmaking to simultaneously investigate the functional processes of cinema and of thinking itself. In the 1970s and 1980s, Snow, responding to a growing institutional commitment to his work, experimented more with large-scale installations, including public sculptures such as Flightstop (1979) and The Audience (1988-89). In recent years, he focused on the specific nature and potential of digital media, yielding works like the video-film *Corpus Callosum (2002). Regardless of artistic genre, Snow consistently engaged in an analytical discourse on the nature of consciousness and experience, language and temporality. He died on January 5th, 2023.

Filmography

• 2019Cityscape — Director
• 2019Waivelength — Director
• 2011Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
• 2011Michael Snow Portrait
• 2009Puccini Conservato — Director
• 2006Reverberlin — Director
• 2005Sshtoorrty — Director, Writer
• 2004Triage — Director
• 2003WVLNT — Director
• 2002*Corpus Callosum — Director, Production Design, Writer
• 2002Solar Breath — Director
• 2001The Living Room — Director
• 2000Prelude — Director
• 2000Preludes — Director
• 1991To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror — Director
• 1990See You Later — Director
• 1989Cloister — Sound
• 1988Seated Figures — Director
• 1987I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art
• 1985Home Movies 1971-81
• 1985Lamentations: A Monument for the Dead World — Thanks
• 1983Funnel Piano — Director
• 1982So Is This — Director, Writer
• 1981Presents — Director
• 1979Cinématon V — N°44
• 1979Cinématon n°44 : Michael Snow
• 1979Grand Opera: An Historical Romance — Wilma Schoen
• 1978Cinématon — N°44
• 1976Breakfast (Table-Top Dolly) — Director
• 1974Two Sides to Every Story — Director
• 1974‘Rameau’s Nephew’ by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen — The Whistler / The Trumpeter / Man at the Table / ... (voice), Director, Writer
• 1972Dream Life — Man walking in the street (uncredited)
• 1971Hapax Legomena I: (nostalgia) — Narrator
• 1971La Région Centrale — Director, Producer, Editor, Sound Designer
• 1970A Casing Shelved — Director
• 1970Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film — Director
• 1970The Stone Age — Aristotle
• 1969Back and Forth — Director
• 1969Dripping Water — Director
• 1969One Second in Montreal — Director
• 1968A Lecture — Narrator
• 1968Snowblind
• 1968Unstrap Me — Music
• 1967Bill's Hat
• 1967For Life, Against the War — Director
• 1967Standard Time — Director
• 1967Wavelength — Director, Writer, Editor, Producer, Director of Photography
• 1966Manual of Arms
• 1965Short Shave — Director
• 1964Little Walk — Director
• 1964New York Eye and Ear Control — Director
• 1956A to Z — Director

Appearances as themselves (11)

• 2019L’œil omnidirectionnel de Michael Snow — Himself
• 2016EXPRMNTL — Himself
• 2016Portrait of Snow — Himself
• 2013Snow In Vienna — Himself - Composer
• 2011Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film — Himself
• 1997Birth of a Nation — Self
• 1996Michael Snow Up Close — Himself
• 1983Snow Business — Himself
• 1969Seminar — Self
• 1968Diaries, Notes, and Sketches — Self
• 1963Toronto Jazz — Himself