La Région Centrale

Michael Snow, still from La Région Centrale, 1971I thought I would focus here on a fascinating work of landscape art that I have only briefly referred to previously. In the late sixties, Michael Snow created three seminal 'camera motion' films which influenced later structural and minimal cinema. La Région Centrale was the third of these, made in the Canadian wilderness using a Camera Activating Machine (CAM) that an engineer, Pierre Abbeloos, built for him. This involved a camera mounted on a robotic arm and able to rotate through 360 degrees so that it could capture a total vision of the landscape. Five days' footage was edited down to a three hour film, which you can see on YouTube. I'll embed it below, although I realise these embedded links tend to disappear after a while.In 'About Snow' (1979), published in October, the journal she co-founded, Annette Michelson quotes Kant's view that we measure everything in relation to ourselves, even cosmic space, and relates it to La…