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*Corpus Callosum (2002) Dir. Michael Snow  Michael Snow first rose to prominence in 1967 with the release of his seminal underground feature Wavelength. Alongside Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969), Wavelength was a landmark release for the then-burgeoning "structuralist film" movement. Manny Farber described it as "a pure, tough forty-five minutes that may become The Birth of a Nation in Underground films."[1] The movie consists of a prolonged zoom from one end of a room to a photo on the wall, occasionally the film coloring shifts, a high pitched tone hits the soundtrack, people weave in and out, you hear The Beatles play "Strawberry Fields Forever." It's a pure breaking down of filmic language and the technical potential of the camera. Over the years, Snow would continue to receive accolades for his experimental film work, most notably <---> (1969, aka Back and Forth) and La Region Centrale (1971), but it would be more than 30 years after the latter, in 2002, when Snow made his next major landmark. *Corpus Callosum is a feature length deconstruction of the digital world. It draws from the elements of his past work: slow zooms, long panning shots, humans weaving in and out of frame performing slightly off kilter activities. But using a computer, Snow is able to have fun with the way digital technology creates and tears down entire worlds. We open the film in an ominous hallway with a static shot, what appears to be a VHS or otherwise low grade camera, focused on a door where the the title of the film has been printed out and taped to it. The "corpus callosum" refers to the band of connective nerve fibers that bind the right and left hemispheres of the brain, opening the pathways for communication between the two. According to Snow, the title also draws on the idea that this part of the brain was once believed to house the human soul. Snow called the movie "a tableau of transformation, a tragicomedy of cinematic variables."[2] The camera then moves from the door to a television set showing a live shot of the door, we linger on it for a moment before finding out that the door leads to a green room of sorts where are actors enter. From there we see the cast move about an office as the camera pans back and forth between the two ends of the long room, which appears to be on a high level of a skyscraper. After some time here, we move into the complete digital madness of the living room. A family sits and watches TV, until the TV disappears suddenly. The wall is filled with various decorations that take turns disappearing and reappearing. The child may reach for a glass only for the glass to disappear before he can grab it. Images bend and move, the room is a total construct, the characters like Sims beholden to an unseen poltergeist-like force. Later we will return to the office building where the film's end credits will run, but after the credits finish we will return to this room for another length of time as Snow builds his digital mischief to a crescendo. While *Corpus Callosum is an experimental work, I find it to be a rather hypnotic one and I hope you will too. The entire movie is available on YouTube, although the quality is not perfect. But Snow seems to be commenting on the Microsoft office culture of the millennium period, playing with nuclear family archetypes, having fun with the editing techniques computers have created, and re-envisioning the visual image. I'll leave you with some words from Jonathan Rosenbaum's contemporary Film Comment review: "In his theorizing, Snow generally comes across like a metaphysician, shunning social meanings like the plague. Yet an interesting historical and social commentary arises from the differences between these two interior spaces: computer screens overtaking TV screens, a sleek contemporary work space that’s all windows overtaking a windowless domestic interior resembling a fallout shelter where 50s kitsch either replicates itself or blows itself up. It’s easy to forget Manny Farber’s early perception that Wavelength was above all about a loft and its implied memory. This film uses camera motion, diverse sound–image combos, photochemistry, violence —- the main staples of Snow’s previous films, with a few of his Walking Woman icons thrown in for good measure -— to tell us something about how and where we live, past and present, as well as what objectification can do to us and for us."[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yx9Nb6-wjIY [1] In that it's a technical landmark, there's no real plot to speak of for it to be a racist ode to the Confederacy. Quote sourced from Annette Michelson's essay on Snow in the Peter Gidal-edited Structural Film Anthology. [2] Interview with Mark Peranson in The Village Voice [3] https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2019/02/corpus-callosum/ Fran edit: Previous Movies of the Month Letterboxd List (now with links to old threads! *work in progress*) Somebody fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 13:39
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 17:17 |
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This is good poo poo. I'm only 35 minutes in, but I was not expecting it to go in this direction. This is like the underground version of Jurassic Park. And just because I'm not particularly familiar with Snow's work, but am very much into underground, experimental, and avant-garde cinema (which includes film but, as this great MotM entry demonstrates, also incorporates video art and new media), I'm gonna share a link to UbuWeb, which is this absolutely fantastic repository of works very much on the same wavelength (lol) as what you're getting here. Just in case anyone wants to go further down the rabbit hole. http://www.ubu.com/film/ Turns out they also have three Michael Snow pieces and a documentary about him from 1996, http://www.ubu.com/film/snow.html
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Aug 5, 2019 05:29
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I love Ubu. I used to have way more free time and could just lose myself in their archives.
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Aug 6, 2019 02:02
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I only watched about 35 minutes of it last night. I got a late start on it, and didn't have time to finish it. I'd like to watch the rest tonight. So far: I absolutely love this. It manages to be absurd, surreal and bizarre without being off-putting. The sound design could easily make this more intimidating, but instead it's more unearthly. It gives the film a level of playfulness and allows moments to have a sense of humor rather than to disturb. In general, I like it when a film feels like the production behind it was fun, and this gives off that vibe. It's creative and unpredictable. I get the sense that Eric Wareheim would be a fan of this. The low resolution on the YouTube link adds even more to the artificiality of the whole thing, and oddly makes the whole thing work and feel thematically cohesive, with now-antiquated computers, technology, and graphic manipulation being used. Also, David Lynch must have seen parts of this, yeah? The nuclear family watching TV feels like it inspired his Rabbits short/INLAND EMPIRE segment. The aesthetic also seems like it informed INLAND EMPIRE, in a few ways.
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Aug 6, 2019 13:59
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Yeah, Rabbits is a really good comparison. And it is funny! I think I might have gotten too stuffy in the OP but I think as far as experimental filmmaking goes the movie has some really goofy moments. Like, it's enjoyable. Glad y'all are liking it, but yeah it's definitely not one to start at like 11:30 on a weeknight.
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Aug 6, 2019 15:13
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TrixRabbi posted:I love Ubu. I used to have way more free time and could just lose myself in their archives. I mean, he is a good dog
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Aug 6, 2019 15:31
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TrixRabbi posted:Yeah, Rabbits is a really good comparison. I had to watch it in parts, too, the fake-out end credits are a pretty good stop-start point, especially cause it seems to “reset” and get a lot slower and more subtle
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Aug 6, 2019 18:04
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Another film to check out if you were a fan of this: Jean-Luc Godard's The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company
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Aug 6, 2019 19:47
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Thanks for posting this. I'm only ~45 mins in, but so far the movie is super interesting from an artistic point of view, not least because of how well it presages the kind of humour that has become mainstream along with everyone having access to a camera. I'm going to infodump about the computers and software in the film though, because I'm a huge nerd. K. Waste posted:underground version of Jurassic Park. It's funny you should mention Jurassic Park, because what both films have in common is a shitload of SGI workstations. There's a few SGI O2s:  And a few more SGI Indys:  By 2002 both machines were starting to get long in the tooth, especially the Indy, but SGI had a firm foothold in the VFX market for a few years after - South Park was animated on SGI workstations until roughly 2001 - so you could still get the majority of high-end VFX software for SGI. This included Houdini, which is still a high-end software used to do physics simulations and dynamic effects in films today, which dropped SGI support in 2004. Houdini was originally developed by two Canadians, Kim Davidson and Greg Hermanovic, who bought out some earlier software called PRISMS in 1987 and redeveloped it. Greg Hermanovic is especially of note for us because he was personally the special effects supervisor for *Corpus Callosum, which were (naturally) entirely done in Houdini, which can handle both 3D rendering like the wobbly toilet people, as well as simple 2D compositing for laying up different shots. I can't really find out whether or not the machines featured in the film were used to produce the effects in the film, but it's entirely possible. The artists working on the film would have faced an interface like this:  Which is not a million miles away from what a VFX artist working with Houdini would see today. e: probably shouldn't let this go without linking the best houdini video. josh04 fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Aug 7, 2019 |
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Aug 7, 2019 00:42
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^ This was a good post and I need more of this early 2000's computer content. So did all y'all breaking the movie up into pieces finish it? Thoughts on completion?
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Aug 12, 2019 00:19
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 17:17 |
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TrixRabbi posted:^ This was a good post and I need more of this early 2000's computer content. Yeah, I finished it on the 2nd watch. I also had friends pop in around the last third. They were confused, and disoriented and off-put for a few minutes before becoming fascinated with it. In the end I think they liked it too? Not too many thoughts that aren't really surface-level, or aesthetic. There's definitely thoughts about corporate homogeneity, the artificiality of nuclear family, being a detached part of the a whole (office workers), and playful cynicism with computer culture, technology and it's relationship to film and visual story-telling. There's a weird cycle of wanting to make a film about computers, filming people using computers, then editing the film on computers, then using computer-specific technology to make new visual art within the film, and then releasing the film and possibly ultimately watching it on a computer. It also has a few gags that explicitly relate to the process of making a film, and actors and direction, and the nature of viewership, which I appreciated. I do think there's affection for technology, satire about the silly thing it's capable of, and also a joking mourning for Luddism. The kids taking a test at desks only to tower them up, climb them and grab the camera felt like a central theme to the whole project. I'll probably return to this in the future. It's got a low-key energy that makes its really watchable, and as I mentioned earlier, the absurdity and surrealism is more playful than oppressive.
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Aug 12, 2019 12:42
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