Writing, cinema and the avant-garde: Michael Snow and So Is This

For something like a quarter of its history, film lived very happily with the written word as an integral part of the possibilities, even the nature, of the medium. Nevertheless, for its first ten years or so, the new medium worked on the basis that it did not need the written word, that in some senses it made itself distinctive by eschewing writing and that part of its supposed universality stemmed from this fact. It was, in a sense, an admission of failure when the evolving complexity of filmic narration in the period roughly 1907-12 seemed to imply the necessity of recourse to written text.