La Région Centrale

Director: Michael Snow

1971 / 180min / 16mm

Shot over the course of five days on a mountaintop in high-altitude Quebec, La Région Centrale is the product, to some degree, of an artist surrendering control to chance operations and allowing a movie to make itself. The auteur here, it might be said, is the custom-designed Camera Activating Machine (CAM), a camera arm mechanism moving according to patterns pre-programmed by Snow, surveying and probing the white wastes of the north—and allowing us an idea of cinema as it might appear after the Age of Humanity has passed. “As fine and important a film as I have ever seen… the first film in which we see the world entirely through shots which are not based on our everyday way of seeing.”—Artforum