What is Film? Program 24

Programm 24

Michael Snow
Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1972–74) 16mm, 263 min.
Canada, English

Snow described the film as a 'talking picture,' and this comment - coupled with his mention of the French encylopedist, philosopher, and author Diderot in the title - pointedly announced to audiences that the film would be encyclopedic and philosophical in the way that it inventoried and explored the nature of sound. Unlike his three major works of the sixties and seventies, Rameau's Nephew ...is not unified by a single visual strategy that creates a dominant perceptual shape. Rather, it consists of some twenty-five sections, significantly different in length. Each segment is a meditation - often comic - about the nature of recorded sound, both abstract and representational, about the many possible kinds of audiovisual relationships, and about their philosophical implications.
The film "is a philosophical discussion about reality, appearance, illusion, representation, verisimilitude, which is undercut by humor in the form of sophisms, paralogisms, puns, repetition, variation, excess." (Regina Cornwell)