Canadian artist Michael Snow is better known for Wavelength (1967), but this rarely screened 1964 film is playful and wonderfully inventive in its exploration of issues that have long preoccupied him. The camera moves across landscapes and cityscapes, often discovering enigmatic life-size silhouettes of a woman standing in a room or among buildings or trees. The resulting tension between abstraction and representation characterizes much of Snow’s art, but when the live woman later appears in bed with a jazz musician who’s apparently played on the sound track, Snow seems to stretch the film’s play on illusion and reality to the breaking point, mixing abstraction, self-reference, and a palpable interracial eroticism. The film’s sprawling if imperfectly realized ambition—to bridge the gap between art making and the larger world—makes it genuinely compelling. 34 min.