*CORPUS CALLOSUM

2/10

Canada 2001 : Michael SNOW : 92 mins

At the end of *Corpus Callosum, we’re shown Michael Snow’s first ever film – a one-minute black-and-white line-cartoon from 1956 in which a waving man kicks out his right leg over and over, the leg getting longer and longer, loopier and loopier each time. It’s a single, simple gag, and it’s quite nice - but nowhere near sufficient reward for enduring the 91 minutes of torture that have gone before.

Though the septuagenarian Snow has for decades been acclaimed as a maestro of world avant-garde and experimental cinema, you’d be forgiven for thinking that *Corpus Callosum was knocked up by first-year (perhaps even first week) film students monkeying around with a digital special-effects computer program. They’d also probably know no better than to come up with such an idiotic title, which, needless to say, is never explained or even mentioned during the ‘action’ of this plotless film - that asterisk is also an especially grating affectation.

We have two main ‘settings’ – an office and a hyper-stylised living room. Various talentless, badly-dressed ‘actors’ move around these spaces or, more often, remain static. Snow occasionally manipulates the picture to make their bodies twist into bizarre shapes, to make background features explode, melt or zoom off, among other rather half-hearted flights of whimsy. The soundtrack has two principal features: buzzing sounds of varying pitch and intensity, and the faint but audible voice of Snow himself giving prosaic ‘direction’ to his ‘performers’.

To be fair, there are one or two moments of invention along the way – as when two people try to enter a toilet door simultaneously, only to fuse into a single jelly-like oblong block which then ‘walks’ around the office space. But such ‘highlights’ are very few and far between. Everything seems to happen agonisingly slowly, and many sequences are elongated and/or repeated way beyond most viewers’ boredom thresh-hold.

Snow seems inordinately fond of uninspired visual tricks, games and jokes – at one point, the performers are instructed to look as though they are “all ears” during a business meeting: Snow freezes the frame and briefly superimposes large comic ears onto their heads. His attempts at surrealism, meanwhile, seldom rise above the grindingly sophomoric – it’s truly depressing that such a lauded film-maker should be so thoroughly unimaginative in terms of ideas and images.

The best ‘gag’ of all is that the end credits – featuring an absurdly lengthy list of ‘cast’ members – come at the 53-minute mark. Even if audiences have somehow managed to stay awake this long, they’d be well advised to take Snow’s hint and vacate the theatre at this juncture. If it’s avant-garde North American cinema you’re after, James Benning provides an austere but accessible entrance point – those in search of a genuinely experimental and groundbreaking Canadian visionary, meanwhile, should look no further than David Cronenberg.

12th June, 2003
(seen same day: Cineside)

For other films rated 1 or 2 check out our Diorama of Dishonour

by Neil Young

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