So Is This (Michael Snow, 1982)

Last seen June 2011. I had forgotten how enjoyable So Is This is, and not just because of Snow's clever self-reflexivity and goofy humor. A large part of the pleasure of This is the fact that, in reading, we treat the word as if it were the primary unit of meaning, but in fact it is the phrase, if not the entire sentence. So as we watch This, we are mentally anticipating the next word(s), and sometimes we are correct -- Snow using familiar phrases like "look at it this way" -- and other times we are wrong. For example, when Snow jokes that the film will be two hours long, I misremembered him calling it a "frightening prospect," expecting the word "proposition" instead.

This may not seem like a big deal, but this is precisely how we read, and how we make sense of narrative cinema. We infer that some things will naturally follow from what we are currently seeing, and the process is an ongoing experience of confirmation and surprise. On a larger level, viewers may think that So Is This will be entirely self-referential, and be amused when Snow digresses onto topics like the Ontario Board of Censors, or makes patently false promises about personal disclosure. 

And on perhaps an even broader level, Snow's use of film time, conflating it with reading time, literalizes a problem that many viewers have with experimental films like Wavelength or La Région Centrale. "I get the point after (X) minutes, so why does it have to keep going for another (X) minutes?" Snow not only maps this frustration onto the reading viewer, who in some cases quite literally "gets" a word well before Snow moves onto the next. But So Is This also answers the separate but related complaint, that his films (or Frampton's, or Warhol's) are just as meaningful when written about or described as when they are actually seen. Here, the distinction is collapsed. In other words, we are all in This together.