Unlike Michael Snow’s previous films based on a single visual strategy, such as Wavelength (1967), La région centrale (1971) and Back and Forth / <---> (1969), Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) does not have a unitary structure, instead consisting of 25 sections, each of which is a kind of meditation, often ironic, on the nature of recorded sound in film and the different relationships between image and sound. In his notes on the film, the Canadian director literally described it as a talking picture, its dramatic progression deriving not from representation but from the relationship between its two basic units, the frame and the recorded syllable.
Although Snow began thinking about this project in the sixties, he did not start work on it until the early 1970s when he returned to his hometown of Toronto, and completed it three years later. This kind of musical comedy features the participation, along with the filmmaker himself, of Chantal Akerman, Babette Mangolte, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, Annette Michelson, P. Adams Sitney, Amy Taubin and Joyce Wieland, as well as other friends of his, many of them linked to the US art scene of that time.
Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, Michael Snow, 1974, 16mm, 270 min., original version with Catalan subtitles.
Copy provided by LUX.
