So Is This

Michael Snow’s film does one thing: white words on a black ground, one word per frame, one after another, and no sound. How long a word stays on screen depends on its length, so short ones flick past and longer ones are given room. The text talks about itself from beginning to end and there is no narrative; a viewer reading it is watching the film and noticing the act of reading at the same time. It was made at the start of the eighties, when experimental cinema had turned towards semiotics and structure, and it is among the best known structural films. The question it puts is simple and stubborn: film as language, language as film.