Michael Snow's La Region Centrale
WIRE 494: "Once described by Jean-Luc Godard as 'pure cinema,' [this] 190 minute feature is essentially an epic landscape painting devoid of narrative or human presence. Snow, his partner Joyce Wieland and their colleagues mounted a camera to a robotic arm in a remote location in northern Quebec. The camera pans, tilts, and rotates, moving continuously in every conceivable direction. The mountainous landscape and the sky beyond it appear alien, particularly as the only sound present is the whirring robotic mechanism. The act of watching becomes a meditation of sorts. As the camera picks up speed, the film climaxes in abstraction with terrestrial colors swimming past the eye"