The Cinematheque

Free Admission

“Michael Snow catapults us into the heart of a world before speech, before arbitrarily composed meaning, even subject. He forces us to rethink not only cinema but our universe.”

Louis Marcorelles, Le monde

For a 21-year-old Chantal Akerman entering the avant-garde cradle of New York in the early ​’70s, watching Michael Snow’s La région centrale was a formative encounter: ​“The sensory experience I underwent was extraordinarily powerful and physical. It was a revelation for me, that you could make a film without telling a story.” In the magisterial three-hour work, made in the twilight of the American lunar missions, the camera, attached to a robotic arm, casts its roving 360-degree eye across a remote, seemingly otherworldly mountaintop in northern Quebec. Set to a soundtrack of waves and pulses emitting from the control box of the automated apparatus, La région centrale ​“transports its audience to a rugged Canadian landscape that is discovered at noon and then explored in seventeen episodes of dizzying motion as the machine’s shadow lengthens, night falls, and light returns” (Martha Langford, Art Canada Institute).

“Lliterally like nothing you have ever seen before … [La région centrale] is important because it can change both your perception and appreciation of the world and of other film … An enormously complicated, varied, and beautiful film.” John W. Locke, Artforum

“Awe-inspiring … While Snow’s Wavelength is internationally recognized as a groundbreaking masterpiece, La région centrale is unequivocally the Canadian avant-garde great’s crowning achievement.” Barbara Goslawski, Canada on Screen catalogue

This free National Canadian Film Day program is presented in conjunction with our spring retrospective ​“Chantal Akerman: No Home Movies.”