Snow describes *CORPUS CALLOSUM as a "tableaux of transformation, a tragi-comedy of cinematic variables." The film is a postmodern vision of life at home and work. There are two main settings: a static look at a garish living room complete with nuclear family watching TV and a trucking movement through an indistinguished office. Common through both are often computer-generated "metamorphoses" (as Snow terms it) of various degrees of plausibility involving identity, the family, and more commonly sex.

Snow shows an admirable insistence in exhausting the list of effects that video software can do. At one point I wondered whether I'd see the liquid metal effects from THE ABYSS and TERMINATOR 2, then voilà! I was in between laughing and shedding a tear over that bit of prescience.

Two parts seem computer effects-free: a bird's eye view of puzzled schoolchildren at their desks seems tacked-on (it ends as an illustration of another of Snow's principles) but is a much needed pause before the effects barrage begins anew. His hand-drawn three-minute cartoon from 1956 ends the film.

Since that cartoon, Snow remains emphatic about film as a phenomenon of the two hemispheres - sight and sound - joined indubitably by the artist/director. There is little effort to hide the computer animation - "callous" indeed. (Snow confesses not to bother with narrative in *CORPUS CALLOSUM so as not to disturb its artifice.)

Snow doesn't hide his hand. When the ever-changing electronic hum quiets down his voice can be heard giving instructions to his crew. In both living room scenes Snow can be seen reflected on a wall mirror á la Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding.

*CORPUS CALLOSUM is indeed a corpus, Snow's own, a video catalogue raisonné of his greatest hits. From the beginning it reminds of WAVELENGTH, his Walking Woman figures prominently in the living room, and there is his first-ever cartoon of a man with the metamorphic leg.

Thanks to technology, Snow can now direct his "hand" down to the pixel what is dispiriting is the lack of anything more significant than the sight gags. As it recalls past successes, *CORPUS CALLOSUM seems satisfied to takes refuge in being little beyond an extrapolation of the title, an "unpolished" "body of work" indeed.

Notes to follow.

Kubelka accompanying a business trip to Africa

perhaps owing to the forum (lecture style vs Snow's Q&A), I had a better grasp of Kubelka's concerns (similar to Snow's: betweens, film vs digital) pars pro toto, cause and consequence, sadness and happiness coexisting film as existing not in the frame itself but in between frames and sounds director as nature-substitute bringing together sight and sound film as sculpture/why film will survive the digital assault