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Tuesday, Nov 19, 1991
To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror with See You Later/Au Revoir
See You Later/Au Revoir, which has been described by Snow as "a slightly activated Vermeer," depicts a simple action, recorded with a Super Slo-Mo video camera. (18 mins) "Call it a chemical conflagration...Snow's latest celebrates the original entertainment spectacle. To Lavoisier opens, in silence, with a close-up of a wood-burning stove and then a hand feeding the flames. After a time, we hear an unmistakable crackle. Sustained more-or-less throughout the film's remaining 40-odd minutes, the sound of the fire comes to seem the song of the medium...What's extraordinary about To Lavoisier is not what the film shows (or how it shows it) but the film stuff itself...The footage looks as if it were developed in a bathtub and baked in the oven. The emulsion is scarred, lightstruck, watermarked, solarized, explosively blotched with a deep blue or golden orange overlay. The visual surface 'noise' is continually amazing. There's a pattern beneath every pattern and that pattern is as vibrantly random as a toddler's scribble-scrabble...Snow names his film for Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, the 18th century scientist who, among other things, explained combustion as oxidation and proved the law of conservation of matter." (J. Hoberman, Village Voice) Image collaboration by Carl Brown. (53 mins)
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