Scènes de la Vie Française: Paris (1986) by Rose Lowder
Sunday, November 22, 1987, 8:00 pm
Art and Visual Research
The Films of Rose Lowder
Rose Lowder in person
Rose Lowder has emerged as one of Europe’s most audacious and committed filmmakers, programming a strong ongoing film series in conservative Avignon, maintaining one of the few serious libraries devoted to experimental and alternative cinema on the Continent, and continuing to create a powerful body of filmwork. All of Lowder’s films are concerned with visual research in art and society in general, but far from being academic and sterile exercises, they are brimming with rich imagery and a passionate concentration of her materials. Rue des Teinturiers was filmed frame by frame in the camera over a 6-month period, adjusting the focus of each frame so that certain graphic features or items in the street form a complex spatio-temporal series of rhythms and phenomena. Scènes de la Vie Française: Paris and La Ciotat are two of a series of four films which retain the precision frame by frame filming allows but approach the problem of movement differently, weaving together places filmed from an identical viewpoint at various times: Jardin du Luxembourg, Place de la Republique, Canal St. Martin, etc. in Paris; the port, dry docks, workers leaving the shipyards, fishermen, a tanker being launched, and the beach in La Ciotat.