We are proud to welcome the first filmmaker to ever visit Hallwalls, pioneering media artist Michael Snow. For over fifty years, this prolific artist has continued to challenge the boundaries of those art forms within which he works, and his experiments in painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and New Music have earned him accolades and awards too numerous to mention. While film theorists consider Snow's 1967 film Wavelength (which features experimental filmmaker and former UB professor, the late Hollis Frampton) to be archetypical of the subset of experimental film known as structural film, musicologists and jazz aficionados consider his 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control and his collaboration on its soundtrack with Albert Ayler's group (Roswell Rudd, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Geary Peacock and Sunny Murray) a landmark in early free jazz recordings.

This screening (note the 7:00 p.m. start time!) features three recent films and videos, The Living Room, Triage, and REVERBERLIN, which uniquely exemplify Snow's exploration of sound and image. The digital short The Living Room (2000), which was the impetus for the feature length Corpus Callosum (2002), "dramatizes and multiplies chosen manifestations and implications of 'On/Off' and/or 'Absence/Presence'' (Canyon Cinema). Triage (2004) is double projection film made in collaboration with Canadian filmmaker Carl Brown. Like a surrealist Exquisite Corpse, neither Brown nor Snow knew what each other had filmed, and musician John Kamevaar composed a two-channel soundtrack in a similarly "blind' method. Snow's experiments in sound and image are also evidenced in the feature length REVERBERLIN (2006). Using concert footage of CCMC, the free improvisational ensemble Snow co-founded in 1974, Snow digitally weaves together images and sounds from performances that have taken place across the globe. "I desired an equivalence of seeing and hearing so that one could actually listen, pay attention to the music, as well as follow the picture development,' Snow writes. "That was the goal of New York Eye and Ear Control, too, but it used a completely different aesthetic from REVERBERLIN, which contains more of the freedom that video shooting, editing and animation have given 'film' artists."

Nearly 32 years after his initial appearance at Hallwalls original location, we are pleased to present Michael Snow in our newest home at The Church, and welcome him back to our cinema. Michael Snow will also have concurrent installations on view at the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Some publications related to this event:
September, 2007 - 2007
October, 2007 - 2007