Presents
Michael Snow's new film is his most generous exuberant and buoyant offer- ing yet As usual, if s a meditation upon the processes of perception. As usual, too, it's a rich, spirited film that should tease viewers into new thouglits how- ever often it is viewed.
The film is structured in three precise pai-fs. The first two dramatize the dis- loitions which result when a willful artist imposes liimself upon the mate- rials of his craft. The third demonstrates the greater riches when the artist subor- dinates himself to the splendors of the world.
In the 10-minute first section, Snow presents the classical odalisque - a nude reclining in an artificial room. Snow opens with a thin vertical sliver of light, which he slowly stretches out into the full image. When his stretch reaches the Cinemascope proportion the woman has been rubberized, dehuman- ized, rendered grotesque. Here Snow exposes the filmmakei's intervention by prop, framing and manipulation of the formal elements of bis shot. Halfway through, the image is squashed into a horizontal slit, then stretched out again. Contrary movements are required to
make the whole. As in the film's overall structure, thesis and antithesis give way to the climactic synthesis.
The second part is a hilarious 20- minute narrative in which the nude rises and joins a visitor to search for a trivial object. For the most part. Snow's camera is stationary, but the entire set moves back and forth. Both actors are hilarious in the stiff movements and in their heroic effort to handle their mov- ing set A phonograph plays classical music, its needle leaping crazily with the movement We hear Snow call out numbers to direct his actors. We see his crew reflected against the set. The man freezes in mid-air whenever the set moves him out of camera range. This is a slapstick exposure of traditional narra- tive cinema, in which a trivial drama is performed against an artificial setting and its entire world is manoeuvered by the director. The comedy lies in Snow making explicit the manipulation that is usually hidden.
As in the whodunit involving the body on the floor in Wavelength, and the classroom incidents in « » (informally called "Back and Fprth"), Snow raises the spectre of narrative cinema only to drop it in favour of analyzing the perception of experience. So in the latter stages of his narrative sequence in Presents, the romantic drama becomes a disaster movie. The furniture wobbles, crumbles, and is crushed. Finally Snow's camera breaks through the setting and we escape into the splendor of the real world. Our first image is the oppressive skyscraper, but we're free.
The third section is a 70-minute al- bum of intriguing rhyming beautiful, unsettling, and extremely personal shots of life, in all its fullness and chaos. Here Snow shows the world instead of a fiction. Here he allows the objects their own free movement unframed, un- ordered. There are passages of breath- taking beauty - the arc of a bird in flight the sinuous routes of machines on earth. There are passages of chuckling irony - a pan of a tlresser ends on a Genie ; next a worker unloads a barrow of trash.
Limited as stereotypes, these people interact v\ ith each other within the con- fines of an inept plot Not only do the episodes fail to contribute to anV un- . folding of Kelly's character, but they also seem gratuitous. The scenes at the monastery for instance, appear to have been written simply to feature the bear. Moi-eover, the plot-lines are so separate from each other that the movie ends three times. The major resolution, Kelly's facing of herself- that should reveal the
extent of her transformation - occurs first and far too early. The second, a nuisance that ought to have bfeen edited out, involves a renewed attraction between her father, and her remarried mother, who is soon removed from the story. Eventually, almost as an afte]> thought, the villain is set up to get what he, if not Russia, desei^'es. But because Kelly cannot take part in the revenge, the joke falls flat. This ending, however, reveals why the movie is not just bad but objectionable.
Kelly is not really the heroine's story, and hemmed in as she is by cliches and stereotypes she has -no chance to act. Always rescued by a father who knows best a spunky kid dwindles into a passive girl. Kelly insults children.
Anna Carlsdottir •
K E L L Y d. Christopher Chapman p. Samuel V. Freeman asst p. George Anthony exec in cliarge of prod. Robert Meneray sc Robert Logan mus. Micky Erbe, Maribeth Solomon song «ril Keep It With Me,» comp. by Maribeth Solomon, Micky Erbe, sung by Donna Ramsay r e c by Andrew Hermant art. d. Charles Dunlop superv. ed. David Nicholson, cfe. d.o.p. Paul Van Der Linden, esc. L prod. Fran Rosati casting Canadian Casting Asso- ciates sc. consult Francis Chapman cont Mai^ garet Hanly cam. op. Cyrus Block cam. op. (2nd unit) Rod Parkhurst f o e puller Brent Spencer foe. pullers (2nd unit) Then Eglseder, Peter Smith clapper/loader Harvey La Rocque ed. Byron white, Peter Dale loc. sd. mix Larry S'jtton boom op. Lars Ekstrom sd. ed. Fred Brennan Yanina Jezek (asst.) key grip John Dillard Brinson dolly grip Richard Allen, John Brown asst. grip Tom Hansen, Brian Kuchera prop, master Tracey Budd, Craig Ponton lassL) hair Salli Bailey make-up Sandy Cooper a-lL David MacLeod (1st), Kim Win- therl2nd), Val StefofllSrd) p. s e c Karen Hamasaki p. acct. Lacia Kornylo p. bookkeeper Joanne Jackson p; sec. Angela Gruenthal p. assL Vikki Haimila l o c man. Michael MacDonald assL art d. SLuzanna Smith, Daniel Bradette p a i n t e r Susan High gaf. David Anderson electr. Rob Brown best boy electric Rod Merrells gen. op. Glen Sherman set d. Steve Shewchuk asst set dresser Chris Merrells wardrobe Deborah Weldon, Jackie Mei' rells (assL) craft serv. Mike Brown driver c a p t Cy Bariy, drivers Mark Barry, Don Brown, Betty Elliot, Martin Gutkind, Hoy Hart, Ken McClennon stills Bruno Engler spec efx. John Thomas Rex Cooley (asst) Whitewater consult Robin Sims safety rafts Vivian Fehr pilots Tony Hugman, Scott Swan- son stunt doubles Betty Thomas, Graham Elliott, Erwin Oertli animals Hubert Wells trainers Che- ryl Shwaver, Karin Dew bear trainers Lloyd Beebe, Marinho t:orreira vet Terry Quesnel l.p. Robert Logan, Tv\'yla-Dawn Vokins, George Clutesi, Elaine Nalee, Doug Lennox, Alec Willows, Dan Granirer, Jack Leat Mona Cozart, Paddy While r e - r e c Nolan Roberts, Film House dist Paramount Pictures coL
35 mm running lime 95 min. p.c Famous Players Film Corp. 1980
There are shots of unaccountable detail and white flowers, as if tearing away.a
68/Cinema Canada - May 1981
J
REVI
and appreciation, like the lengthy views
of a steamroller, later a snowplow, as
Snow's lingering camera seems capti- a grisly surgery.
vated by physical details. There are Presents is based upon the paradl sequences that rhyme textures - a of authorial personality. The first tvw/ blanket, then a field of snow. There are parts demonstrate the falsity and foHV^ moments of drama - from a hunter an art in which the creator obtrudes nis proudly displaying his moose head. voice and craft The third is a celeWfF Snow pans blurrily across fields of red tion of the woBWifwhich the dire^r
revulsion. No rose-lensed optimisK^
Snow cuts in an Arctic caribou hunt anO^
modestly studies and preserves in eter- nal "presents," and presents to us as delightful gifts (the third sense of "presents"). The paradox is that the film
is most personal in the section in which the artist does not intrude. He shows himself most profoundly when he shares whathesees.Sothis,thethirdsection,is . so much weightier and more moving than the illusionist cinema which he
' satirizes in the earlier comic episodes. The first tWo episodes are enclosing and false. The tfiird is an exhilarating exer- cise in opening out
The third part is a collage of apparent objectivity. Neither heard nor seen. Snow is present only by his iiripltcit functions of choice of material, filming and editing. But the world we see there is very much Snow's world. The section abounds with characteristic Snow shots - dizzying pans back and forth, and waves, and birds, and walking women. And a beaming Joyce Wieland hard upon (well; really soft) a shot of a happy family celebration. Not just the world opens out in that third section, but the private Snow as well.
The first part is accompanied by a modulating electronic drone, that seems to harmonize as the image comes into focus. In contrast the sound in the second part is rooted in the setting both in the character's room and in the direc- tor's operation. In the third part the sound works ambiguously between the synchronous and the imposed. Each cut is accompanied by a drumtap, like a pulse. We can't determine whether this tap causes, announces, or reacts to the change in image. That is the very am- biguity of the filmmaker's relationship to his image here. He is a present recorder. He is at once passive before the spectacle and active in its preserva- tion.
For all its Import, though, one must not lose sight of the sheer pleasure that thisfilm presents. If s not often that one feels regret when a Michael Snow film comes to its end. But here one is disap- pointed when that brilliantly executed slapstick sequence is over. And even more when his collage of splendid reality draws to a close. But then the quickening drum-pulse heralds our return to the worldbeyond thescreen. There we can exercise the sharper, appreciative eye for color and movement that Snow has primed. There his Presents will en- hance our own present.
Maurice Yacowar •
PRESENTS d/p/cant/^/sets Michael show sd. John Kamenaar, Bill Buxton, Brian Day cam. Keith.Lock p.man. Robin Collyer Lp. Jane Fellowes, Peter Melnick colour 16 mm year 1980 (with the "•iJlanceoftheCanadaCouncil)running time90 "lin; dist Canadian Filmmaker's Distri
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