La Région Centrale Screening

Pew Fellow David Hartt’s approach to developing The Histories (Le Mancenillier) was heavily informed by the 1971 film La Région Centrale. To record Northern Quebec’s remote mountain landscape for the film, conceptual artist Michael Snow had a technician at the National Film Board of Canada construct a special camera that could be programmed to move horizontally, vertically, laterally, or in a spiral at varying speeds. The experimental three-hour film is composed of seventeen shots of a mountain landscape, recorded entirely by preprogrammed camera movements.