Dir. Michael Snow
One of the first avant garde
films I saw was
Michael Snow's
legendary
Wavelength (1967).
Depending on your opinion, it is a) an examination of space and time in a
single forty or so camera zoom, or b) forty or so minutes of staring at a wall.
I hated it, and it didn't help that, since
Snow's
work is not officially released outside of cinema screenings, that it was a
murky and digitally blurred version. I want to rewatch it, more so if I could
see a good 35mm print on a big screen in my dreams. The films of the Canadian
avant garde filmmaker/jazz musician have now become of immense interest for me,
thanks to my growing flexibility with unconventional and experimental cinema.
It also helped that I have discovered
Michael
Snow has a
sense of humour.
So Is This (1983) has you read a film
as a text, complete black screen with sentences, one word at a time, being shown.
Its already a brilliant work but gets better when I discovered this secret
behind
Snow. It also admits how most
people would react with it with a self reflecting sense of humour, and takes
pot shots at Canadian film censors with additional subliminal swear words. This
discovery may make
Snow even more
accessible now, as a normal man who is willing to use humour within his
experimental works to emphasise the points made, and
*Corpus Callosum is such a film.
*Corpus Callosum is a ninety minute series of absurd moments. Most
of it consists of people in a Toronto office stuck in dead end work, with
tangents including an extended one of a family in a gaudy, pop art decorated
living room. Using what he could afford, or intentionally using cheap looking
computer effects for a cartoonish feel, Snow
distorts both what is in these scenes and the film itself. People contort or
become one single rectangular entity. Some, using distinct same clothes on
different actors, are duplicated and interact with their mirrors. People
abruptly disappear, expand or have any conceivable body part expand to absurd
proportions. The rooms and objects in them do this too, the sequences in the
gaudy living room having a wall of props move, disappear and even explode on cue,
while the image the viewer sees are manipulated too. Continually moving to the
right when the camera does move, the filmed image is bent as well with one
sequence literally turning the world upside down.
The result is playful. Knowing
absurd in how it causes you to keep an eye on what will be effected. Objects,
people, environment, even colour is effected and manipulated in the film. It's
an experiment in image and content, but it comes off as bizarre segments which
go out of their way to distort everything into peculiar shapes and types, the
very rudimentary nature of some of the effects actually adding to the idea. If
it wasn't for a lack of a narrative, the already thin wall between avant garde
cinema, absurdist comedy and cult cinema would be pierced by a film like this.
A film like this undermines the division between the sides by using
"weird" images and comedic skits to their own effect in showing the
manipulation of the image too. *Corpus
Callosum is all the moments of breaking expectations and what is expected
in conventional cinema stripped of a narrative, put together as a full ninety
minute compilation. It's very much an avant garde film, minimal at times with
prolonged moments of nothing happening as you wait for what's next and get
absorbed by the droning mood of the work. But it still plays with the exact
type of bizarre image manipulations that take place in something like Nobuhiko Obayashi's Hausu (1977). It even shows some vulgar humour with a truly giant
member, coming off as a sexual fantasy cut short by the work office bell.
The settings in the film are Snow poking fun at real life drudgery.
We don't know what the office workers do around their computer desks, and for
all we know they aren't doing anything adding to the joke, but seeing them at
times be as bendable as taffy and in strange manipulations is liberating, the recesses
of the mind's imagination having fun with bending reality. The living room
sequences are traditional family life - pop art crossed with a sitcom set - put
through the same bendings. The other sequence, at first out of place but
finally making sense, is a God's eye view of a class of school kids during an
exam, only for them to all notice us, the camera eye, and deal with it. By
physically manipulating their own surroundings, the kids are the only
individuals in control of their world in a reality where the adults are manipulated
themselves. It's also seen as an auto-retrospective of Snow's work. Having not seen a lot of his films, it's difficult for
me to comment on this, but I can comment on one of the final sequences, where
characters watch one of Snow's own
films from the fifties in a cinema screening room, the director weaving
together his life into a self reflection. It evokes Lisandro Alonso's Fantasma
(2006), set in a cinema complex where, as we follow a man in a minimalist
journey around the rooms, he eventually goes see one of Alonso's own films. Like it, *Corpus
Callosum becomes a theatre-within-a-theatre by doing this, seeing Snow's own mind within a creation of
his, best amplified by the beginning showing the camera zoom into the security
camera screen and view the doorway it will eventually go through within a
reflection of the reality. Everything after this is understandably, because of
this potential symbolism, possible because it sets up having its own set of
rules. So far as to even have its own end credits, in a ninety minute film, at
fifty to sixty minutes into itself, catching this viewer off and furthering the
breaking of convention for a joke.
Considering the exclusive nature
that dangerous coats this sort of cinema - difficult to see, acclaimed by privilege
film critics at festivals that could be argued to be elitist - this is only
"difficult" in that avant garde cinema requires some patience and a
willingness to follow it by its own rules before making a judgement on it. The
distinction that understandably causes a lot of people to badly react to this
sort of cinema is in most cases likely a surprise at having to try to view
something which plays with a different tone, this film at times liable to be
frustrating to even those who love it. But this is why "experiment"
is the perfect word for this cinema to use, in that breaking from conventions
of cinema on purpose, the reaction it causes can be anything. Even with the
same minutes of the film, the experiment can cause two or more different
emotional reactions. But like genre and cult films, this one presents its rule
breaking by the use of comedy, absurdity, and in one moment, eroticism grossly
exaggerated, the same playfulness that with a vulgar sense of the strange it
has no shame is using.
Its lack of availability is a
shame, for by being only available in cinema showings at art museums and specialist
film theatres, it becomes an elitist product against the tone and purpose of
the film, Snow disconnecting perceived
expectations from an art film in favour of making the dumbfounding and silly
the examples of reality being questioned. The punchlines are the examples given
to his discussions of the form of image, sound and framing, and you are allowed
to laugh and think about them together at the same time. Not the presentation
you think of when you think of experimental films you can only see rarely at
museums, and frankly even those films are unfairly ostracised into being
education rather than ventures into experimentation a viewer should be able to
enjoy just for disrupting images and sounds in new ones. *Corpus Callosum emphasises for me that it is possible for avant
garde cinema can be just as rewarding in terms of creating new, enticing images
and sounds as well as provoking deep questions, that they are possible to
actually enjoy for creating said new images and sounds like an optical illusion
or an absurd gag do when they manipulate
the same things. The film never feels serious as what is stereotyped for an experimental
film to be, undermining the notion by being legitimately hilarious in its
intentional moments of weirdness. Viewing it, the idea that experimental film
is seen as only education, filmic vegetables to the meat of entertainment
cinema, is baffling when it gets as much glee from a penis gag as well as with
its structuralist presentation. In many ways, the broadening of my palette for
this type of cinema is because, like finding that Snow had a sense of humour, I found these films weren't just
educating my eyes and brain, but could be as entertaining a blockbuster, silly
like a comedy, titillating like porn, frightening like horror films, kinetic
like action cinema or animation, and that they could be as much inclined to the
basic delights of entertaining you through their subversions as well as using
the formalist camera zooms and minimalist soundtracks to force you to question
the meaning of the visual and audible. This
is where *Corpus Callosum gains its
greatest virtues from, and this is how someone should enter the film through.
That if it has a very intellectual message behind it, you should not try to
drag it out viewing it but find entertainment through the base pleasures of
stuffed foxes exploding and a man literally being given birth to through dodgy
CGI, and realising the intellectual meat of the film will come when you enjoy
these absurd pleasures first and then think about them. And considering how
bizarre those images sound even in a review, it's impossible to consider the
film on just cerebral levels as, using the area between the two hemispheres of
the brain as its title, it has the same purpose as that area of brain matter in
having two different sides, the creative and logical, the serious and the
absurd, have an interconnecting conversation with each other with the film.
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