Michael Snow
Presents
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Add rightsFormat DVD Interzone
Original format 16mm
Year 1981
Artist(s) Michael Snow
Running time 90 min
Films
PRESENTS (1981) 90'
Description
"What appears, at first glance, to be a scratch at the beginning of Presents literally opens up a film within the film. When the film figure awakens and becomes a woman in an unreal "real" setting, the burlesque satire of structural cinema begins. It is not the camera that moves, but the entire set, in this first part of a three-part series of "investigations" on camera movements. In the second part, the camera literally invades the set; a sheet of plexiglass placed in front of the camera dolly breaks everything in front of it as it moves through space. Finally, this monster of formalism forces through the set wall and the film cuts to a rhythmic montage of shots where it zigzags along lines of force and shifting fields of vision, like the eye in nature. Snow pushes us to accept present moments of the visible, but the single drumbeat coinciding with each cut in this elegiac section announces at every instant the irreversible disappearance of life."
— Philip Monk, Art Express