Cityscape (Michael Snow, 2019)

About five hours ago, I have the pleasure of seeing Michael Snow's latest film Cityscape at Rice Cinema, in a program I curated. I'll be honest; I programmed the film sight-unseen, and I was not disappointed. (In fact, I'm sure several people in the theater hear me cackling in delight in the front row.) Part of a project called XL Outer Worlds, commissioned by IMAX to celebrate the company's 50th anniversary, Cityscape is a short film that involved Snow bringing out his 360-degree mechanical camera rig from La Région Centrale and setting it up on the banks of Lake Ontario, across from Downtown Toronto. With the IMAX camera attached, Snow would, in a sense, make an answer-film to his 1970 classic, describing an urban environment instead of a desolate, rocky patch of earth.

The resulting film is as hilarious as it is clinically precise. It begins with the CN Tower piercing the frame from below, followed by a slow pan across the Toronto skyline, and a wide shot of Lake Ontario, the water filling the screen. (This could be seen as an allusion to the end of Wavelength, but Snow doesn't dwell on it.) From the start, the film's visuals are accompanied by a jazzy drum riff. Snow gradually begins moving the camera across Toronto faster and faster, as the drum beat accelerates in tempo. (This in itself is a wry bit of comedy. At first it seems that a drummer is simply picking up the beat, but eventually we can tell it's a recording that's being digitally sped up.) In the camera's back and forth, of course, Snow is alluding to his 1969 film <--> (Back and Forth), but whereas that film took place in an enclosed space, the abstract wipe of the skyline serves to accentuate the linear, architectural conformity of Toronto. The screen is eventually a blocky haze of black and gray stripes.

As if to complete his camera movement trifecta -- a little Wavelength, a lot of <---> -- Snow zeroes in on the middle of downtown and begins to rotate the image 360 degrees, not with the intensity of La Région Centrale, but rather in a perfect circle. Downtown is turned upside down, and Lake Ontario becomes a sort of surrogate sky. What is particularly interesting about this section is the framing of this segment of the skyline. Snow gives us a close-up of Downtown Toronto that is filled with almost nothing but banks and financial institutions: TD Dominion, Scotiabank, CIBC, Royal Bank of Canada, Sunlife Financial, and others. 

As this segment of Toronto spins faster and faster, it begins to resemble the tumbling of a washing machine. ("Money laundering"?) But more than anything, Cityscape is a work of abstraction, which is, of course, exactly what capitalism does to lived space. What, Snow seems to ask, has become of my city? In taking on a corporate commission, Snow has delivered a major work of critical modernism, showing once again why he is one of the all-time greats.