Snow Dream

Gigantic Snow Sculpture

Silence, darkness, cold. Three men working wordlessly in the isolation of a snow-covered, mountainous landscape, sawing, cutting and shaping a huge cube of frozen snow. One of the men is French-Canadian sculptor Réal Bérard, the others his assistants. This film allows us to be spectators at the creation of a work of art far from any art gallery or civic square, a work seemingly made for the satisfaction of its creators alone. Extremes of heat and cold, fire and ice, are contrasted in this film: the men warm themselves all through the night at the campfire, even with the cigarettes they light. The monument they sculpt seems to be a synthesis of Eskimo and Aztec styles and imagery - broad faces, schematic birds, zigzag patterns, blocky forms. The film gives us a brief sequence of the finished work existing mysteriously in the world as the musical score picks up the plaintive theme one of the trio has been playing on a mouth organ by the fire. We see the sculpture survive a dramatic electric storm and torrential rain. Then its makers, still wordless, engulf it in a blazing conflagration. Impermanence would seem to be a major theme of this film, impermanence and the elemental forces at work in life and art.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.