1. Michael Snow, "A Statement on Wavelength for the Experimental Film Festival of Knokke-le-Zoute," Film Culture 46 (1967): 1.

2. Although Snow had done commercial film animation and made one short animation film of his own, A to Z , in the mid-1950s, his work as an avant-garde filmmaker properly begins with New York Eye and Ear Control in 1964.

3. Brydon Smith, ed., Michael Snow/Canada (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1970), 19.

4. Pierre Théberge, "Conversation with Michael Snow," Michael Snow , exhibition catalog (Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1979), 17.

5. "Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation," Cinétracts 17 (1982): 14.

6. Interview with the author, 14 March 1975.

7. Bruce Elder, "All Things in Their Time: On Michael Snow's « ," Cinétracts 9 (1980): 65.

8. "Michael Snow and Bruce Elder in Conversation," 17-18.

9. Snow's own awareness of these critical limitations is suggested in his remark, "[I] feel there's been less free seeing or less open seeing amongst cognoscenti of film in the last few years." See Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film: The Front Line--1983 (Denver: Arden Press, 1983), 183.

10. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 , 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 370, 374.

11. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 240.

12. Annette Michelson, "Toward Snow," Artforum 9 (June 1971): 32.

13. Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, "Conversation with Michael Snow," Film Culture 46 (1967): 3.

14. Michael Snow, "Michael Snow on La Région Centrale," Film Culture 52 (1971): 61. break

15. Michael Snow, "Letter from Michael Snow," Film Culture 46 (1967): 4.

16. Regina Cornwell, Snow Seen (Toronto: PMA Books, 1980), 73.

17. Mekas and Sitney, "Conversation with Michael Snow," 3.

18. A defect in almost all zoom lenses (including, presumably, the Angénieux lens Snow borrowed from Ken Jacobs) causes the image of an object in the center of the frame to gradually slip off center during a zoom-in. This so-called side-drift, however, could be corrected in Snow's case, because the film was shot over several days and the camera removed after each day's shooting. For the next filming session it was set up anew, which permitted Snow to realign the position of the photograph so that it remained in the center of the frame.

19. Albie Thoms, Polemics for a New Cinema (Sydney: Wild & Woolley, 1978), 8.

20. Snow's own use of the dolly shot in Breakfast ( Table Top Dolly ) (1976) and Presents (1981) vividly--and comically-- emphasizes the physical effects of the camera's forward movement, in contrast to the purely optical effects of the zoom in Wavelength . In Breakfast , the camera (behind an invisible plexiglass shield) dollies toward an untidy still life of breakfast items and slowly pushes the objects along the table until they tip over, tumble off, or are smashed against the wall at the far end of the table. In Presents , more violent dollies (again with the camera behind a plexiglass shield) demolish a room full of furniture. In Wavelength objects in space remain untouched; it is space itself that is flattened by the optics of the zoom lens; in Breakfast and Presents , objects are flattened, but perception of the space they occupy remains unchanged by the physical movement of the camera.

21. "Ten Questions to Michael Snow," Structural Film Anthology , ed. Peter Gidal (London: British Film Institute, 1976), 37.

22. Ibid.

23. Snow, "A Statement on Wavelength ," 1.

24. Théberge, "Conversation with Michael Snow," 19.

25. Mekas and Sitney, "Conversation with Michael Snow," 3.

26. Snow, "Letter from Michael Snow," 4.

27. Actually, an occasional pan and tilt is cut short, producing unexpected skips in the metronomic rhythm of the camera's movements.

28. Snow, "Letter from Michael Snow," 4.

29. Snow, "Michael Snow on La Région Centrale ," 61.

30. Ibid., 60. Unless otherwise indicated all subsequent quotations from Snow on La Région Centrale are from this source, 58-63, passim.

31. Cornwell, Snow Seen , 122.

32. Interview with the author, 14 March 1975.

33. Michael Snow, "The Camera and the Spectator: Michael Snow in Discussion with John du Cane," Studio International 186, no. 960 (1973): 179.

34. John W. Locke, "Michael Snow's La Région Centrale," Artforum 12 (December 1973): 69.

35. R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing , 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, World University Library, 1973), 107.

36. Snow, "The Camera and the Spectator," 179.

37. Interview with the author, 14 March 1975. break