Canada's Multimedia Master: An E-Mail Interview with Michael Snow

WILLIE VARELA: Michael, first of all, I want to thank you very much for agreeing to respond to these questions for a special issue of the Journal of Film and Video. I wanted to start with a couple of basic questions. I'm curious about your family background and how it contributed to your decision to become an artist. What did your parents do in Toronto, where you were born? How did they help you to follow your artistic, creative sensibilities? In my case, for example, my father was a frustrated opera singer and my mother had no interest in creative endeavors. She was extremely practical, having grown up during the Depression. Were there any economic or social factors in your childhood or adolescence that inspired you to take up the arts? At what point did you realize that you had a unique viewpoint, a unique vision, that compelled you to become a multimedia artist? MICHAEL SNOW: My mother died on 19 February 2004, just two days short of her one-hundredth birthday. She was Francophone, from Chicoutimi, a town in the Lac St. Jean region of Quebec. She was a very good, but not a professional, pianist; she could sight-read anything and could play, for example, all the fugues in The Goldberg Variations. Her love of Debussy, Ravel, and Mozart influenced me. She had very good taste in clothing, furniture, and food, and she was a gifted linguist. As well as French and English, she spoke and wrote several other languagesSpanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and some Russian and Greek. My father was Anglophone, part of a family that arrived in Ontario in the iSoos. His grandfather was a land surveyor, as was my father when he met my mother. Then he became a civil engineer and was chief engineer on the construction of many bridges, highways, and water and sewer systems in Ontario and Quebec. They brought the French and English streams of Canadian culture to me and influenced me to become a musician/constructor. wv: What kind of training did you receive? Was this training valuable in a positive sense, or did it present you with a framework of ideas to rebel against? I ask this because many of the core figures of the American avant-garde, or the New American Cinema, to use Jonas Mekas's term, were largely self-taught and were very opposed to academic training in the arts. Stan Brakhage, for example, went one semester to Dartmouth and dropped out. Yet he went on to become one of the major figures in the avant-garde-in world cinema, for that matter. In your experience, does training in the arts help or hinder the development of a personal vision? Who were your major influences and how did they inform your ideas and your work? MS: I studied design at the Ontario College of Art and started to paint during those years (apart from the design projects, which were interesting). I had a wonderful teacher named John Martin who critiqued and encouraged my painting and suggested things to see and books to read (e.g., Mondrian and Kandinsky's writings). I got a job in the film business learning to do animation. That was my introduction to film, my training in it. Apart from that instruction on the job, I am an autodidact as far as photography, cinema, or music goes. I don't oppose academic training-any visual artist should learn to draw-but how one learns is a matter of personality. My first major influences were Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Pablo Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Paul Klee, and Duchamp. I started to play jazz when I was in high school and made most of my living this way between 1958 and 1961.1 had the honor of playing with some of the best New Orleans, Dixieland, and swing musicians, including Jimmy Rushing, Buck Clayton, Pee Wee Russell, and Vie Dickenson. Music has continued to be a career. I play many concerts, both solo and with groups (often the CCMC of Toronto) and have made many recordings. My music for the last twenty years or so has not been jazz, however. wv: By the time you started making films, with New York Eye and Ear Control (1964) being your first major work, you were already a successful photographer, painter, and sculptor. …

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