The essay was written for a book accompanying a major exhibition by Canadian artist Michael Snow (b. 1933) at the Arnolfini (2001) and John Hansard Galleries (2002). Since his gallery work is little-known in the UK (compared to his reputation in North America and continental Europe) A L Rees was asked to set his films in this wider frame. The essay discusses Snow's history as a minimalist sculptor and avant-garde filmmaker, and focuses on his ability to cross cultural barriers. Rees places Snow in the milieu of Bruce Nauman, Steve Reich and Richard Serra, as well as in the 'Underground' cinema of Jonas Mekas. Rees concludes by showing how his experiments with sound, oblique imaging and irony are unrecognised preludes to the new art of the 1990s, and compares his ideas to those of Douglas Gordon, Sam Taylor-Wood and other contemporaries. The core of the essay connects his films to his wider context in gallery art, a factor recognised in his native Canada, in the US and in Continental Europe but rarely in the UK. Rees also explores Snow's place in the transition from abstract expressionist painting to the new minimalism in the 1960s; reviews his crucial years in New York from 1964 to the early 1970s; and traces the painterly, sculptural and musical concerns in his films. Finally, Snow is discussed as a precursor of digital art in the gallery, in his thinking as well as his practice. The essay gathers material from film, art and performance history, and tries to clarify some of the complex issues of collaboration and mutual support in the minimalist art scene of the 1960s and 1970s. It incorporates artists' statements of the period and later to evoke Snow's formation. The book, now a standard anthology, also includes Martha Langford, Lucy Steeds, Amy Taubin, Malcolm Le Grice, Regina Cornwell, John Pruitt and Kevin MacNeilly.