Boundless Ontologies: Michael Snow, Wittgenstein, and the Textual Film

Abstract

<p>While most fi lms use moving images as their primary currency, there are several experimental fi lms—such as Michael Snow’s So Is This (1982)—that instead traffi c in the written word. This article argues that such experiments problematize rigid conceptions of fi lm’s ontology and instead foreground the usefulness of a Wittgensteinian approach to cinema. Unlike a book in your hand, a fi lm keeps on going whether you like it or not. For it has an existence of its own. A microcosm larger than life, its boundaries are boundless. —James Broughton1 The fi lm of tomorrow will be lettrist and composed of subtitles. If at its conception cinema was by virtue of its images an attack on reading, the day will come when the cinema will be a mere form of reading. —Isidore Isou</p>