I thought I would focus here on a fascinating work of landscape art that I have only briefly referred to previously. In the late sixties, Michael Snow created three seminal 'camera motion' films which influenced later structural and minimal cinema. La Région Centrale was the third of these, made in the Canadian wilderness using a Camera Activating Machine (CAM) that an engineer, Pierre Abbeloos, built for him. This involved a camera mounted on a robotic arm and able to rotate through 360 degrees so that it could capture a total vision of the landscape. Five days' footage was edited down to a three hour film, which you can see on YouTube. I'll embed it below, although I realise these embedded links tend to disappear after a while.
In 'About Snow' (1979), published in October, the journal she co-founded, Annette Michelson quotes Kant's view that we measure everything in relation to ourselves, even cosmic space, and relates it to La Région Centrale.
This film, in its circling, spiraling, rising, sweeping movements, crossing the distances between peaks, creating, in imperceptible loops through empty skies, reversals of direction which disorient the riveted spectator, seems to question, through kinetic counter-example and disorientation, the "ground" of the Kantian "view" which founds the modern sense of "place".
The absence of a 'cameraman' leaves the viewer free to identify with the camera itself. 'Snow's infinitely mobile framing, his mimesis of and gloss upon spatial exploration' provide a 'cinematic rendering of the grand metaphor of the transcendental subject.'
In a 1995 article for Parachute Thierry de Duve takes a different view. He disagrees with those, like Michelson, who have thought of the CAM as an ideal model of the Cartesian-Kantian subject, because the machine is not reflexive - it sees everything but itself. His article discusses Michael Snow's 'deictics of experience' - deictics being words that depend for their meaning on context (like 'I' and 'you'). Michael Snow is not the 'I' looking on this landscape. 'He is not the monk before the sea, or atop of the mountain'. What we see is not his experience. 'He has set the conditions of experience, but stopped short of its synthesis.' We as viewers are in a similar position to Snow, who says that while making the film "I only looked in the camera once." La Région Centrale is centripetal - 'the camera never reaches out into the landscape, it pulls the landscape towards the center.' Watching it we can't identify with the camera. As Snow said of one of his other films, "you aren't within it, it isn't within you, you're beside it."
La Région Centrale clearly offers rich material for theorists but also provided an ideal ending for Malcolm Andrews' fine book, Landscape and Western Art (1999). Snow's original 1969 proposal had positioned the project in art historical terms, as "a gigantic landscape film equal in terms of film to the great landscape paintings of Cézanne, Poussin, Corot, Monet, Matisse." But this would be something new in art, confusing the old stable coordinates of foreground and distance. Nevertheless, by filming on a Canadian mountain, Snow tapped into themes that, as Andrews says, have perennially haunted discussions of landscape in art: vanishing wilderness, the end of nature and representation of landscape as 'souvenir'.
Over the last 500 years western landscape art has been like a barometer of anxieties over the balance of power between nature and culture. In the late twentieth century, we know that nature — that 'out there', that 'other' — is not necessarily perpetually self-renewing. It is more like ourselves than we ever feared. When it is not offering us dreams of green spaces as utopian as ever the most artificial pastoral managed to be, landscape art in our time comes burdened with guilt. 'I recorded the visit of some of our minds and bodies and machinery to a wild place,' wrote Snow, 'but I didn't colonise it, enslave it. I hardly even borrowed it'
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