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MacDonald:
Things were going so well here. What drew you to New York?
Snow:
Well, I had been following what was going on in New York very closely. For a long time, I had been moved (and still am) by the accomplishments of Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline. That's fantastic work, and I was carrying on my own dialogue with it, trying to define what
I
could do, what
I
could contribute, and after a while it seemed that doing this via magazines and occasional trips to the Albright Knox (in Buffalo) or to New York was not enough. I decided I should just get there. I was scared shitless, and Joyce was even more scaredso we went.
All during this period I kept thinking that in order to get somewhere and get something out of myself, I should make a choice. It seemed like the lesson was that Willem De Kooning
paints
and that's why it's so good. That's what he does; he does just that. And there's really a lot in that argument. So I tried not to play when I first went to New York. Mind you, I didn't know how I was going to make a living. It turned out that I did play a couple of times to make a couple of bucks, but basically, I was trying to get rid of music, to make it a hobby.
But when I got to New York, I had something I hadn't counted on, a contact with the most inventive music that was going on at that time, the "free musicians." I already knew about Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. I had their records. But I met a guy named Roswell Rudd, a great trombone player, through a Dixieland clarinetist named Kenny Divern, another fabulous musician. I had a studio with a piano in it that I made available. There was no place for them to play, and the public antipathy was incredible. Cecil was considered a total nut. It certainly seemed that way the first time you heard him, but he was, and is, amazing.
Anyway, music wouldn't go away. But I was trying to be a painter. I was working on
The Walking Woman,
which, as you said earlier, involved works of many kinds in many places. A lot of it was what I call lost works: making things that were outside, in public spaceson subways, in the street, in bookstores . . . it had a lot of range, despite the fact that it was concerned with this single outline.
The main thing I was trying to do was concentrate on visual art and get a gallery. I watched everything that was going on and gradually met people. That's when I met Hollis Frampton. I first noticed him at openings at Green Gallery. He was very noticeable! And he was at every opening. Gradually, I started talking to him, and at first I only knew that he was a photographer who was interested in art. I guess when I first met him he hadn't made any films.
MacDonald:
When did you meet him?
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Snow's Walking Woman out for a stroll.
Snow:
Probably 1963, 1964. I went to New York in 1963.
MacDonald:
In
The Walking Woman Works
you were putting the same figure in place after place, in serial fashion, which has a good deal in common with film. Were you conscious of that connection at the time?
Snow:
Well, in the work itself there was a lot of sequential stuff. There are several pieces that are, say, four or five variations of the same figure. And, yeah, I did think there was something filmic about it. And then in 1964 I made
New York Eye and Ear Control
. I had had the idea for that film in Toronto.
When I first went to New York, I met Ben Park, who worked for one of the television stations I think, though he also produced films in a small way, I guess. I told him my ideas for
New York Eye and Ear Control,
and he said that he'd finance it. So we shot quite a bit of stuff, including a sequence of Marcel Duchamp and Joyce walking across the street, seen through a mask cutout of the Walking Woman. Anyway, Park finally decided against going ahead with the project and kept what I had shot. There wasn't too much enmity there, the film just stopped. Later on, I decided to try to do it myself.
MacDonald: New York Eye and Ear Control
combines your fascination with music and
The Walking Woman Works
. It's as if you were learning how to work with film as a means of getting this other work
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down, but then, when you were done with that film, you were ready to be involved with film at a level comparable to what you'd achieved in music, painting, and sculpture.
Snow:
Yeah, although
New York Eye and Ear Control
was interesting in itself. As far as I know, I invented the idea of putting art worksparts of
The Walking Woman Works
out in the world, and then documenting the results in another work. The photographic piece,
Four to Five
[1962], was the very first time I did this, and the film expanded the idea. The business of making a work by documenting some action that you take hadn't happened yet, as far as I know, and I'm kind of proud of the priority of it. On one hand,
New York Eye and Ear Control
was another transformation of
The Walking Woman,
but I was also trying to work with the possibilities of the medium, especially with duration.
One of the things I wanted to do in the film was to bring two aspects of myself together. I used to refer to it as a classical side and a romantic side, or Apollonian and Dionysian. At the time, I felt I was rather schizophrenic. At any rate, the imagery is measured and calm, but beside it is this expressionist, romantic music. Most of the action is in the sound.
I already felt objections to the general use of sound in films, especially to the way music is subordinated to image. Even the greatest work of the greatest artist, J. S. Bach, is often used to set up a certain attitude in commercial films, and I've hated that for years. I wanted to do something where the music could
survive
and not only be support for the image. I think I accomplished that in
New York Eye and Ear Control
.
MacDonald:
Was
New York Eye and Ear Control
shown a lot? At what point did you become part of the New York underground film scene?
Snow:
Before Joyce and I got to New York, Bob Cowan was already there. He's from Toronto. In fact, he went to the high school I went to, Upper Canada College. And when Joyce and I went to New York on visits, we would see him occasionally. Sometimes we'd drive all night, and we'd park outside his place in Brooklyn and have a nap, then wake him up at eight o'clock. We used to get stoned and start driving, it was very nice. One time I drove all the way from Toronto to New York whistling Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk tunes. But anyway, on one of these visits Bob said, "There's two friends of mine coming over with a film they just made. Do you want to see it?" And it was George and Mike Kuchar. They were nineteen. They had just made