Country: Canada
Year: 2005
Duration: 20'
An artist delivers a painting to his lover’s apartment. He unwraps the painting, shows it to her. A sudden dispute develops and the painter smashes the painting over the head of the woman’s husband. The painter exits, the wife/lover walks away. But SSHTOORRTY isn’t only the image of a staged event: the dialogue is in Farsi (with subtitles in English), the loop takes place 12 times, the image has been divided into two halves each superimposed (sound and picture) one on top of the other. “I realized that I’ve never wanted to make a purely narrative film, never had and therefore perhaps I should. Perhaps I should finally make a film that really tells a story. Thus SSHTOORRTY. Also the title is the word ‘short’ superimposed on the word ‘story.’ [...] This makes a simultaneity of actions that occurred ‘linearly.’ Before and After become a Transparent Now. Arrival and Departure are unified. It’s truly ‘filmic,’ one transparent ‘film’ over another. It’s a ‘painting’ about a painting.” (M. Snow)
Biography
film director
Michael Snow
Michael Snow (Toronto, 1929) studied at the Ontario College of Art. After his studies, he founded a studio for film animation and realized experimental and conceptual films and videos. Apart from working as a filmmaker and artist, he regularly performs as a musician, both solo and with his band CCMC. His visual artworks have been exhibited world-wide, exspecially at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), The Hara Museum (Tokyo), The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Centre Pompidou (Paris).
FILMOGRAFIA
A to Z (cm, 1956), New York Eye and Ear Control (mm, 1964), Short Shave (cm, 1965), Wavelength (mm, 1967), Standard Time (cm, 1967), Back and Forth (mm, 1969), One Second in Montreal (cm, 1969), Dripping Water (cm, 1969), Side Seat Paintings Slides (cm, 1970), La Région Centrale (1971), Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot - Thanx to Dennis Young by Wilma Schoen (1974), Breakfast - Table Top Dolly (cm, 1976), Presents (1981), So Is This (mm, 1982), Funnel Piano (cm, 1984), Seated Figures (mm, 1988), See You Later/Au Revoir (cm, 1990), To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror (mm, 1991), Venice (cm, 1995), The Living Room (cm, 2000), Prelude (cm, 2000), Corpus Callosum (2002), WVLNT Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time (cm, 2003), Triage (cm, 2004), SSHTOORRTY OR SHORT STORY (cm, 2005)