MEKAS: The film is divided into certain segments. The camera is never static. The only static element in the film is, or are, the division signs, which look like the letter X blown to a full frame. They divide the film in 10 or so segments. Is there any system or logic in these divisions?

SNOW: No mathematical form is involved. Those crosses sort of bracket each suite of movement. It opens with a circular movement on the ground, gradually rising like a big spiral. It goes up around and around on the ground and gradually rises until it reaches the horizon and then goes up into the sky. And that is like a kind of statement or theme of the whole film. Because that’s really the material of it all, the circular movement. And then it goes on into elaborations of various kinds.

MEKAS: Each segment deals with different movements?

SNOW: Different possibilities and different speeds. You may have the same movement happening again but at a different speed. Or you may have a combination of, say, just the vertical with the rotation but at the different set of speeds. So it’s like a variation system thing, but it doesn’t progress by any kind of additive method. But it builds. It gets to a certain level, for instance, during the dawn sequence. The tempo remains fairly similar, and then it gradually speeds up at the end to its most extreme.

MEKAS: At this point I’ll repeat what we see on the screen. As the camera goes through its positions, we see this rocky prehistoric landscape, this pagan landscape, with just stones and nothing living. For miles and miles, you see mountains, and a lake, but no sign of man. As the film progresses, gradually one begins to get a feeling of watching a landscape painting, a landscape painted with a camera. In a very simplified way, we could say that that’s what this film is. We have here the first landscape painting of cinema. As this proceeds, at the same time we hear a sound which consists of three or four kinds of beeps and their combinations. What are those beeps?

SNOW: They are not the original, but they are modelled after the original tapes that we made to move the machine.

MEKAS: That is, as we see the images, we hear the actual beeps of the tapes that moved the machine.

SNOW: Yes. They are in sync. You can understand them in different ways: as orders to the machine, or… I was, I guess, trying to cover the sound space in the same way as the visual space. It goes from very high to very low. It’s also very very quiet. It’s like a nervous system. It’s like a consciousness present in this place that is totally wild. The image that you see, the place is distant and wild.

MEKAS: Why did you choose a “dehumanized” landscape?

SNOW: I wanted to make the movie more sort of “existential.” I wanted the spectator to be the sole center of all these circles. It had to be a place where you can see a long way and you can’t see anything manmade. It has something to do with a certain kind of singleness or remoteness that each spectator can have by seeing the film. And also, I think I wanted to say that wildness should be left as wild as possible, as long as there is some left…

MEKAS: What do you think this film does to the viewer?

SNOW: What it does visually, for one thing, it’s interesting to think that there are no holds in it for the eye, except for the cross (or “X”). So that your eyes are being moved. I was trying, in a sense, to compose for moving one’s eyes. Like if you’re watching the rotation movement where the camera movement is just centered on the lens—which, as far as I know, has never been done before—an interesting thing happens to your eyes. Your lines of vision get tangled, because you are always making these turns, and you are always making a little hop, because you can’t follow the thing all around all the time. And I was trying to work from moving your eyes in that way, for a control of moving one’s eyes. I was literally arranging your eyes, the movement of them, at least the muscles of them, but also the iris part of it too, because there are sections where the amount of light is controlled. For instance, in the dawn sequence, where it goes along the dark ground, and then it goes into the sky, and what you have there is the screen itself just full of pure light, and it gets cooler, and then it gets warmer and warmer and brighter and brighter.