Each of Michael Snow's works, spanning across painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, holography, drawing, publishing and music, invites us to experience, question and contemplate the representation, its process and material. Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen illustrates his research both in the visual arts and in sound: "For me, it is an authentic 'talking picture,' built from the true units of the syllable and the frame. All the possible image/sound relationships centering around people and speech generate the movie-audience relationships: a wide range of emotional possibilities; the experience of seeing/hearing this film. 'Speech,' 'Language,' 'Culture' - their sources, their nature... recorded, imaged, prove (?) that in this case a word is worth 1000 pictures.

The 16mm films on this DVD reflect Hamlyn's early formation in painting and drawing, where intense observation was central to the effort to realise images of a visible world that is anything but straightforwardly apprehensible. All the work stems from the way the film medium lends itself to a particular way of structuring temporal images. In the case of film, as opposed to video, the characteristics and constraints of the technology push one towards a way of working with the frame as the basic spatio-temporal unit of construction.