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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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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:37 |
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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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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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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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^ 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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