Zero Degree Snow
Single-channel video, color, no sound
3:04:19
2012
Michael Snow’s 1971 film La Région Centrale, bitrate-throttled and motion-stabilized. If the goal of structuralist film is to strip film down to it’s most basic material and visual components, reducing the image to the lowest possible resolution can be seen as a latter-day supplementary gesture.
A series of substitutions take place--Michael Snow’s complicated camera-tripod-robot is replaced with a motion-stabilizing effect, and his alien Québec landscape is replaced with a publicly available, bitrate-throttled version of the original film. Each of the camera apparatuses--motion stabilizing and tripod-robot--are frequently in opposition to each other, with each turn of the tripod inducing a frantic, but ultimately pointless, counter-gesture.