Objects of vision: the polymorphic cinema of Michael Snow

Abstract

This paper explores how the sensory spaces within the works of Michael Snow represent kinesthetic and audile-tactile modes of vision, proposing an integrated form of visuality that functions in tandem with the other senses, relating to the sensus communis proposed by Aristotle. While Snow's cinema is often characterized as more objective, technological, and immaterial than the subjective and poetic aesthetic of Brakhage, Snow's films present a similar yet distinctly idiosyncratic paradigm of multisensory perception through their sculptural, deconstructive nature. While Snow's camera lens remains focused on the exterior world, his films present spaces that journey far from the illusory and disembodied nature of the scopic regime that Martin Jay (1988) terms "Cartesian dualism," instead seeking out a unified field of energetic vision through relationships between movement, duration, sight, sound, and the embodied limits of vision itself, and are deeply informed by a sustained multidisciplinary approach.