First Pick: La Region Centrale by Michael Snow

Snow said that this film would look like the report of an alien probe sent to Earth. Here's a review I wrote a year or so ago.

Finally, after waiting thirty years, I got to see Canandian experimental filmmaker Michael Snow's three hour masterpiece, La Region Centrale. Describing experimental films is a bit difficult, but I'll try nevertheless. Snow had a special camera built that was capable of all sorts of movement--panning, vertical rotation, zooming--and these movements could be combined as well. He set the camera on a deserted mountain top in Northern Quebec, and programmed the camera's movements using pulses and beeps that also function as the film's soundtrack. The images include only the barren landscape, the sky, the sun, the moon, water, and shots of varied length of an X that serves as a sort of punctuation device. In fact, the X opens the film, and as I learned from the projectionist, Snow himself provided directions for showing the film. (He wanted to insure the projectionist did not consider this the leader and begin with the first image of the landscape.)

If the film can be said to be "about" anything, then it's about camera movement, landscape, and the apparatus itself, which is seen as a shadow, resembling some sort of Iron Giant. After the X disappears, the camera tracks along the ground, showing closeups of the various rocks and bits of grass scattered about. Then, the camera begins to rise and makes a slow, 360 degree vertical arc, returning to where it started. The pace of each arc varies, as does the angle of the vertical arc, so the camera does not always return to the spot it started from. This is just the beginning. The first part of the film seems to begin in the afternoon and continues into the evening. Eventually, as it begins to grow dark, it gets much harder to follow the camera movement. I think as the spectator, you begin to study the camera movement so closely that these sequences deliberately frustrate the attempt to construct a kind of meaning for the film.

By nightfall, only the moon is seen against the black background. The moon makes about a 30 degree arc that begins at the top right hand side of the frame and ends on the frame's right side. Eventually, the camera is swinging so wildly that the moon is jumping all over the screen, at times inscribing a circle with the frame.

In the film's final section, we get to see a number of new camera movements. One movement begins at ground level and begins to rise vertically, but when it hits the nearly cloudness and white morning sky, the movement is so slow that it's impossible to trace the pattern until the camera returns to the ground where it makes a slow curve. Eventually, I recognized the movement as a figure eight (but I'm not completely sure if I'm right.)

In the film's last forty minutes, we finally get a real glimpse of the surroundings. The camera now begins to pan horizontally from left to right while at the same time moving slowly up and down in the shape of a W. The movements, each accompanied by a tone to trigger the movemnt, continue until a prolonged pulse signals the camera to pan 360 degrees in a straight line. We see the vast stretches of mountains and a lake clearly, along with one great boulder nearer the camera. Another tone signals the camera to pan in the opposite direction.

For the conclusion, after the X screen, the camera is moving so quickly that we see only rapid blurs of white-blue sky and browns. The camera, though is making a sideways movement as well, and the effect is like watching a moth beating its wings rapidly. Finally, the screen explodes in a mixture of reds and yellows. The end.

I don't quite know what to make of it, but it was one of the great filmgoing experiences I've had. Snow, I think, wishes somehow to let us analyze, using the part of the brain that makes sense of patterns of color, light, and movement, but then to take it away, forcing us to surrender to that human part of us that can live in doubt, free from the need to analyze. We are also connected to something quite elemental in this three hour film that affords not one glimpse of a human or animal. Still, in the shadow, though, is the ghost of the machine.