Primarily known for his experimental films and digital works exploring perception and the properties of cinema itself, Michael Snow is one of Canada's leading artists, working in music, painting, sculpture, and photography. Louis Marcorelles wrote in Le Monde: “For La Région centrale, Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed . . . an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally, or in a spiral. The film is one continuous movement across space, intercutting occasionally the X serving as a point of reference and permitting one to take hold of stable reality. Snow has chosen to film a deserted region, without the least trace of human life. . . . In the first frames, the camera disengages itself slowly from the ground in a circular movement. Progressively, the space fragments, vision inverts in every sense, light everywhere dissolves appearance. We become insensible accomplices to a sort of cosmic movement. . . . He catapults us into the heart of a world before speech, before arbitrarily composed meanings, even (before) subject. He forces us to rethink not only cinema, but our universe.”