La Région Centrale (1971)

Interesting facts

La Région Centrale is a 1971 experimental Canadian film directed by Michael Snow. The film is 180 minutes long and shot over a period of 24 hours using a robotic arm, and consists entirely of preprogrammed movements.

Production

Snow wanted to film a location with no traces of human activity. He originally considered the countryside north of his mother's birthplace of Chicoutimi in Saguenay, Quebec as well as Kapuskasing or Timmins, both mining areas that his father had surveyed in Northern Ontario. He scouted northern Quebec and found a mountain 160 km (100 mi) north of Sept-Îles.

Snow shot La Région Centrale from September 14 to 20, 1970 with his wife Joyce Wieland, Abbeloos, and Bernard Goussard. They chartered a helicopter to transport them to the mountain. Snow and his team were shooting for five days, producing sixty hours of footage. He edited the film during a residency at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

For the film's soundtrack, Snow wanted to use the tones that controlled the CAM. He found it difficult to record the sound directly onto film in sync with the image; instead, he used a modified Revox to record the tones coming from the CAM's control box on quarter-inch cartridges. He dubbed the sound in post-production.

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