Admission: $2.50

For the making of La Région Centrale (Central Region), Michael Snow had a special camera apparatus constructed by a technician in Montreal, an apparatus capable of moving in all directions: horizontally, vertically, laterally or in a spiral, and at varying speeds, utilizing an intricate mechanical, computer-operated gadget. The film was shot on top of a mountain in northern Quebec.

“... La Région Centrale is an epic camera exercise in which... we explore, test and document everything within the given radius that a mounted camera and machine, placed at a fixed point, are capable of. The programmed movements of the machine-and-camera are almost human in the manner in which it tries, via its cyclopian eye, to make integrated sense of the prescribed area in front of it. In many ways it seems to be following a primitive, ritualistic series of explorations and probings... much in the same way that we, on landing on a far planet, might scrutinize our new unknown surroundings without being completely aware of where we were or what results we might arrive at....

“...The film begins with the camera scanning and slowly moving upwards, followed by the sound of regular electronic beeps. There is a sense of timelessness. The first dawn. The first view of an unknown planet. A virgin experience. The slow rising of the giant eye.... from the small rocks of earth to the heavens. The eye of collective man becoming aware of his isolation in a place where everything else has unity.”

-Bob Cowan, Take One, Vol.3, No.3.

“If you become completely involved in the reality of these circular movements, it's you who is spinning surrounded by everything, or conversely, you are a stationary centre and it's all revolving around you. But on the screen it's the centre which is never seen, which is mysterious. One of the titles I considered using was !?432101234?! (an adaptation of a sculpture title) by which I meant that as you move down in dimensions you approach zero and in this film, La Région Centrale, that zero point is the absolute centre, Nirvanic zero, being the ecstatic centre of a complete sphere. You see, the camera moves around an invisible point completely in 360 degrees, not only horizontally but in every direction and on every plane of a sphere. Not only does it move in predirected orbits and spirals but it itself also turns, rolls and spins. So that there are circles within circles and cycles within cycles. Eventually there's no gravity. The film is a cosmic strip.

“I'd wanted to use another non-verbal title... but hadn't settled on one when Joyce (Wieland) saw the words ‘La Région Centrale' in a book on physics in a bookstore in Quebec City and suggested it. I think it's fine, very appropriate.”