Made during the heyday of film theory’s infatuation with the textual aspects of the medium and of complex semiotic approaches to the language of cinema, the film is a text in which each shot is a single word, tightly-framed white letters against a black background. Snow manages to defamiliarize both film and language and enters the contemporary debate about film being / or not a language.
“A silent film of 45 minutes consisting of single words of this “script” or “score” placed on the screen one by one, one after another, for specific lengths of time…Several different strategies were employed on timing words/passages of the film. Image quality changes too, and the situation of an audience reading a film is a special one, not to be duplicated by reading this.”