Earth for Aliens

The clip above is an excerpt from Michael Snow's 1971 film, La Région Centrale. The feature length version of the film contains the same rotating camera, at the same mountain-top location, with the same mechanical, sci-fi beeps, though for a total duration of 3 hours. So what is Snow trying to say about rotating a camera in a single location for 3 hours?

It seems obvioius to me that Snow is depicting visions of Earth as seen from an alien spacecraft ( demonstrated by his specific sound design). The camera seems to survey (scan?) the planet with a number of different perspectives that distort our perception of life as we know it, even of "up" and "down." Snow does an incredible job of visually interpreting the Earth outside of some normal human context.

This representation of the Earth is particularly interesting considering when it was made. Released in 1971, Space was a fresh idea. Humans launched into space for the first time not more than a decade and half before La Regione Central. The Sci-fi genre was finding its foundations. It's even proposed that the noises in Snow's film allude to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released in 1968. This was a time when the idea of space challenged the human perspective like never before. To go beyond our planet meant that we could literally look back at ourselves from a new point-of-view - to see the human experience from an inhuman eye.