So Is This

This film is filmed text. The film reads: “This is the title of this film. So is this.” This film is an in between the author and you. It is communal reading. Within my work it could be described as a child of “One Second in Montreal” and “Rameau’s Nephew.” “A delightful film, full of humour and sentience, it is also an odd film: a text-film, a silent black-and-white talky in colour, a self-reflexive document and a fictive construct, a non-movie that paradoxically fulfills and subverts the implications in the titles of such books as ‘The Language of Cinema’ and ‘How to Read a Film’… by a filmmaker of subtle genius.” – Michael Ethan Brodzky, Arts Canada, 1982 “…extraordinary as Michael Snow’s new film is, it’s best described briefly – the better to keep its surprises intact…Snow manages to de-familiarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into a theoretical debate (is film a language?), that has been going on for 60 years…he creates a visual dynamo that loses nothing in motion for its absence of pictures.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice, 1982 “Snow’s film addresses all the issues which Socrates’ condemnation of written language (in Plato’s ‘The Phaedrus’) raises…It seems obvious that the serial presentation of the words reveal that discourse (written or spoken) occurs in time and that the words which constitute a discourse present themselves one after another, like moments in time. The brilliance of ‘So Is This’ is that it challenges these apparently obvious truths.” – Bruce Elder