The Central Region

In director Michael SNOW's "The Central Region", a brilliant convergence of form and content, camera movement becomes the raison d'être. Rarely, if ever, has a film so clearly delineated the role of the camera in our reception and perception of the object filmed. To make the film (which took just five days to shoot), SNOW and technician Pierre ABBELOOS designed a mechanized camera that was able to move without human intervention in every direction imaginable. To further erase the influence of humans, SNOW filmed on a mountaintop in a remote area north of Sept-ÎIes, Quebec, where his camera roamed the landscape in varying patterns and at varying speeds in a manner both systematic and arbitrary. Far from a dry technological experiment, The Central Region is a clever joke on the landscape tradition in Canadian art.