So Is This
Michael Snow's newest film has been described by J. Hoberman in the Village Voice as a film that "parlays an elegantly simple concept into an unpredictable, cumulatively rich experience. This film is a 'text' in which every shot is a single word. So Is This begins by describing itself (one word at a time): 'THIS IS THE TITLE OF THIS FILM. THE REST OF THE FILM WILL LOOK JUST LIKE THIS...'... (and then) continues to wax reflexive--lying about its length, talking (selectively) about its precursors, anticipating audience questions and lapsing into French.... The ploy allows the beleaguered artist to ventilate--speaking his mind on audiences and answering his critics with disarming humor and a raconteur's timing. More crucially, Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language, creating a kind of moving concrete poetry while throwing a monkey wrench into the theoretical debate on film's status as a language that has been sporadically raging for 60 years.... Snow creates a visual dynamo that loses nothing in motion for its absence of pictures. If you let it, Snow's film stretches your definition of what film is--that's cinema and So Is This."