TALES OF LOHR: REQUIEM FOR A STRUCTURALIST
Remembering Michael Snow; plus, "This Week in Warhol" gets the chair
Working on my forthcoming book on the Andy Warhol film Empire has afforded me the opportunity to interview a handful of major figures from the world of contemporary avant-garde art and cinema. Among the notables with whom I have connected is Michael Snow, the Canadian-born experimental filmmaker, photographer, musician, and visual artist regarded as one of the seminal figures of what has come to be known as the structural film movement. Snow and I linked up via email in the fall of 2020, and he was gracious enough to share his insights into Andy Warhol’s filmmaking and its relations to his own work in the medium. Snow passed away last Thursday at the age of 94, making me all the more grateful that his thoughts and ideas will be able to inform my own manuscript.
The concept of structural cinema was first explicitly defined by experimental film scholar, critic, and educator P. Adams Sitney, author of the signal historical text Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000. (Sitney is another individual whom I have had the good fortune of interviewing for my book.) In its broadest interpretation, Sitney defines structural cinema as a break from the kaleidoscopic pictorial effusions of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, in favor of a stripped-down, circumscribed approach to cinematic visual presentation. In other words, structural films are customarily constructed around a predetermined cinematographic or editing scheme that sculpts the resultant film into a very specific, programmatic form. Locked-in patterns of shots, images, or camera movements proliferate in these works, although it is also common for structural films to utilize an unchanging, fixed camera vantage point for their imagery. For Sitney, the onscreen content of a structural film is secondary to its fulfillment of its maker’s pre-set technical or temporal concept.
Given the structural film’s dependence on radically simplified visual material, static camera work, and drastically minimalistic narrative potential, it should come as no surprise that Sitney, while not characterizing Warhol as a full-blown structuralist, nevertheless credits him as a significant precursor to and influence on the movement, which began its full flowering in the wake of Warhol’s early, minimalist silent films of the mid-1960s. A film like Sleep (1963), with its relentlessly repetitive loops of footage of poet John Giorno catching some Z’s (loop printing is cited by Sitney as a frequent technical element of structural cinema), or the following year’s Empire, which is nothing but an unmoving long-distance image of the Empire State Building for just over eight hours of runtime, exemplify a certain philosophical perspective on filmmaking, one that privileges a bare-bones, abstract concept over all other elements of the filmmaking process. It is no wonder, given these realities, that Warhol often described his own films as “better talked about than seen.”
The structural filmmakers’ innovation was to explode the methods by which a film could visualize a stark, seemingly infertile subject matter. Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (1970) turns an fixed-camera stare down a university-building hallway into a febrile, pulsating rush of rapid-fire zoom-and-snapback frames. In The Flicker (1965), Tony Conrad spins unexpectedly compelling magic out of nothing but varying speeds of alternating black and white frames. Hollis Frampton, the nearest we have to filmmaker as theoretical mathematician, built films such as the alphabet-centric collage Zorns Lemma (also 1970) and his fractured memory meditation (nostalgia) (1971) out of intricate image and sound patterns that provide the same kind of pleasure to the cinephile as the completion of a particularly challenging crossword puzzle to the gaming hobbyist.
Snow occasionally collaborated with Frampton, appearing as one of the onscreen models in the early Manual of Arms (1966) and acting as narrator for (nostalgia)’s evocative skein of off-sync remembrances. But his own earliest significant film work, 1964’s New York Eye and Ear Control, owes more to both the expansive perspective of the Brakhage-adjacent avant-garde and to Snow’s own background as a jazz pianist, capturing a group improvisation by a band of exploratory New York musicians including saxophonist Albert Ayler and trumpeter Don Cherry. It would not be until later in the decade that Snow’s cinematic project would filter through the structuralist sensibility, achieving its arguable apotheosis with his most celebrated film, 1967’s Wavelength.
While Warhol’s Empire is an epic-scaled study in monochromatic silence and static camera work, the comparatively compact 45-minute Wavelength serves up the essential inverse of this. Built around a barely-there locked-room murder mystery plot, the film’s true raison d’être is the deployment of a slow zoom through a fairly barren room into a photo of ocean waves taped to a far wall. This camera action is accompanied by a droning sound that escalates in pitch as the image foreshortens, until its piercing wail seems to fill the void where the crashing of the frozen-on-film waves should logically be. Wavelength, therefore, delivers almost nothing to the viewer but a moving image, sound, and color, elements of the standard cinematic experience that are nowhere to be found in Warhol’s minimalist cinema. Snow’s film has been alternately praised for its innovations and excoriated for its difficulty. Experimental cinema champion Jonas Mekas declared the film a “landmark event,” and in 2001, the Village Voice included it on its list of the 100 greatest films of the 20th century.
Several other major Snow films extend his conception of the motion picture as purely that: a delivery system for pictures in motion. < — > (aka Back and Forth, 1969) presents imagery of a classroom on the New Jersey campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University, where, for just shy of an hour, the camera pans back and forth, then tilts up and down, occasionally catching glimpses of ill-defined male and female figures, alternating speeds, but never settling, never coming to rest, giving you nothing but movement, at every second, for every second. This idea pushes to even more acrobatic extremes in 1971’s La Région Centrale, a 180-minute opus comprised of seventeen shots of an unpopulated mountainous region. Over the course of the film’s three hours, Snow’s camera, mounted on a specially constructed, preprogrammed computerized arm, cycles through what starts as a series of slow, repeated dips and adjustments, gradually increasing in speed and variation until, by the film’s “climax,” the image is twirling and spinning rapidly around, upside down, and all around.
Snow’s cinema continued to foreground the mechanisms of its own construction throughout his career. 2000’s Prelude, part of a series of shorts created by major Canadian filmmakers including Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Patricia Rozema, pointedly runs its soundtrack backwards, the film’s sounds working at cross-purposes to its visuals and attempts at storytelling. The soundtrack of *Corpus Callosum (2002) privileges Snow’s own offscreen voice in the process of directing the film, shattering any attempt to immerse the viewer in the film’s visually disrupted progress. His final film, 2019’s Cityscape, repurposed the methods of La Région Centrale, this time taking the viewer on a twirling 10-minute aerial tour of the skyline of downtown Toronto.
Casual film viewers encountering works like those of Michael Snow are likely to respond with nothing but irritation and anger. That is because, like Warhol’s minimalist films, Snow’s work gives one so little of what one has come to associate with the cinema: Coherent continuity of imagery, intelligible sound design, genuine forward temporal momentum, and above all, characters and narrative. But the films of Michael Snow, like that of the overarching structural film movement of which Sitney declared him “the dean,” provide a vital counterpoint to the standard cut-and-dried satisfactions of mainstream narrative cinema. When you encounter a film like Wavelength, one that takes away so much of what a “film” generally means to the culture at large, a thrilling possibility for expansion is born in you as a viewer. If you are able to push past your initial resistance to the ingrained difficulties of the Snow filmography, you will find an opportunity for confronting and reflecting on the nature of viewership, for thinking deeply about how the tools and techniques of filmmaking truly manipulate and mold what it is that you see and hear, and consequently what you think and feel during your viewing experience. There is an undeniable purity to the structural cinematic mode, and Michael Snow was among its definitive and most valuable architects.
THIS WEEK IN WARHOL
JANUARY 13, 1953
The photojournalism press service World Wide Photo releases an unattributed image of the death chamber at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. The somber black-and-white photograph depicts a room that is empty, save for an electric chair in the center of the floor. Off to the right-hand side of the photo, a gaping dark doorway is crowned by a sign that reads simply “SILENCE.” This photo is released to publicize the sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Manhattan-native married couple convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Rosenbergs die in this chair on June 19, the first American civilians ever executed on espionage charges, and the first to be so sentenced during peacetime.
Ten years later, in 1963, the state of New York bans capital punishment. The state’s final execution takes place in the same Sing Sing chair that sends the Rosenbergs to their graves. That same year, Andy Warhol commences his Death and Disaster series, a cycle of silkscreens depicting car crashes, suicides, airline disasters, police clashing with civil rights protesters, and other images of destruction, pain, and mortality. The series is the brainchild of Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first curator of 20th century art and a noted Warhol confidante, who, growing weary of Warhol’s colorful Pop-inflected imagery of the early ‘60s, informs him that “it’s time for a little death.”
The Death and Disaster series does not sell particularly well in its earliest iteration, but becomes over time among the most acclaimed works of Warhol’s entire career. The Electric Chair series, an array of canvases depicting the Rosenberg death chamber photo in a panoply of distinctive colors, is given particular praise, critics hailing its deployment of a mass-mediated image to signify how even the profound finality of death can be downgraded in contemporary culture to just another clip-and-save commodity.
In 1995, New York governor George Pataki signs a statute reinstating the death penalty in New York state, this time via lethal injection. However, no executions are carried out between the reinstatement of the penalty and 2004, when the New York Court of Appeals declares the practice unconstitutional at the state level. No attempt since to reinstate the death penalty in New York has been successful.
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