A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

No, not especially. That was a very strange observation on Dunning's part. In those drawings there is some inadvertent interest in movement. They're not futurist or cubist, but sometimes they include different positions of arms, of objects. Well anyway, he liked the work and saw something he thought could be applicable to film.

Graphic Films was the first company in Canada, or one of the first, to do television commercials. They were animated. Everybody, except for the cameraman, Warren Collins, was learning how to do the work. And it's hard! It was my introduction to film.

MacDonald:

Your first film,

A to Z

[1956], is an animation.

Snow:

It had nothing to do with the work. It was just that the camera was available and Warren Collins was willing to help me shoot. Some of the other people working there also made their own films: that's when Joyce got started.

Then Graphic Films collapsed. I had been playing music all along, occasionally with a guy named Mike White. He put a band together, and all of a sudden we got a hell of a lot of work. We were playing at the Westover every night for a year; this is 196162. The band became quite popular, and the Westover brought in a lot of Dixieland stars. I was playing with the former Ellingtonians, Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart; and Buck Clayton, a really great trumpet player; Pee Wee Russell, a genius of a clarinetist. It was a fabulous job. We played in a lot of other places in Toronto, and sometimes in other parts of Ontario. And we made some records. I also started to play with my own groups occasionally because I had started to get interested in what were called "more modern" directions. I played Thelonious Monk pieces, stuff like that. And some of the musicians I met with the Mike White band asked me to play with them. I played with Jimmy Rushing, the great blues singer, in Detroit and a couple of places in New York State. There's a Film Board film,

Toronto Jazz

[1963], by Don Owen, that I appear in with my quartet (it's called the Alf Jones Quartet in the film, can't remember whyAlf was the trombone player).

It was a beautiful time for me. The music was wonderful and lots was happening. I was able to get to my studio every day to do painting and sculpture. During 1959 I had done a series of abstract paintings that I'm quite proud of. In them I gradually did this flip into working with the outline of a figure.

The Walking Woman

started in 1961.

MacDonald:

Are those abstract paintings the ones in

Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film

?

Snow:

Some that I did in Europe are in that film and some of the abstract ones. But I hope you wouldn't make any judgment of the paintings from their appearance in that film!

Page 58

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,