Snow in December
Screening Dates
  • December 18, 2023 8:30

“A grand work of de-sublimation.”

Malcolm Turvey, October

A cyclical work of infinitely malleable identity, shot with actors in a corporate office space, then manipulated using a software program called Houdini, *Corpus Callosum subjects its actors (and their environment) to outrageous distortions and contortions in ways unthinkable prior to the advent of pixel-by-pixel digital animation. The title refers to the tissues connecting the brain’s hemispheres, and this final feature-length work explicitly joins together seemingly disparate parts of Snow’s art: the Walking Woman presides over *Corpus Callosum​’s vivid living room set, and the film repeatedly invokes the origins of thought, from a brilliant single-take classroom scene to Snow’s own nascence as an image-maker. Out of all the artist’s major works, this might be the one we still have yet to fully reckon with—Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the few to have picked up on its radical possibilities.

“[A] radical gem—a midnight movie glazed in broad daylight … [To] watch *Corpus Callosum is to marvel at its sprightliness, its joyous, imaginative air, its effortless attenuation to all that is wonderful and horrible and comical about modern technology.” Scott Foundas, Variety

“Snow’s structuralist epics—Wavelength and La région centrale—announced the imminent passing of the film era. Rich with new possibilities, *Corpus Callosum heralds the advent of the next. Whatever it is, it cannot be too highly praised.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice

preceded by

A to Z
Canada 1956
Michael Snow
7 min. 16mm

“George Dunning had a tremendously beneficial effect on my life. My first film uses the kind of Klee-influenced drawing that Dunning admired and was done as cut-out animation, in which one moves elements of the drawing in each frame. My fascination with film came about through my introduction to it as a particular process—learning what it was/​is from the inside, as it were, adding frame to frame, twenty-four frames passing in one second on the screen.” Michael Snow

“A cross-hatched animated fantasy about nocturnal furniture love. Two chairs fuck.” The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

Media