Back and Forth

A camera turns to the right and to the left, and the movement grows faster and faster. That is the whole event of the film. It was shot in a university classroom in New Jersey and just outside it. Panning horizontally and tilting vertically, the camera sweeps the same narrow space over and over. Michael Snow is interested here not in what the image shows but in the movement of the apparatus itself. The same motion goes on for fifty two minutes. It is counted a significant work of the structural film movement of the sixties. Joyce Wieland and Max Neuhaus, artists of that period, are in the cast. Michael Snow’s Canadian film was completed in 1969.