The Nature of the Archive is the section of the festival dedicated to the intersections between the botanical world and memory, film, and archives. This year, it features a valuable retrospective of Rose Lowder’s films, with the artist in attendance.
Curated by Laura Vichi
Les arts […] n’agissent, si je puis dire, qu’au second degré, par reflets. Ils ne travaillent pas, tel le Cinéma, avec la Matière-vie elle-même.
Germaine Dulac
Rose Lowder was born in Lima, where she studied painting and sculpting at the Art Center (1951-1957) and the Escuela des Bellas Artes (1957-1958). She later moved to London, where she attended first the Street Polytechnic (1960-1962) and then the Chelsea School of Art (1962-1964). Around the same time, she saw Recreation by Robert Breer (1956), a film that greatly influenced her future work. Once she finished her studies, she started working as an assistant editor for BBC. This gave her the chance to meet directors such as Ken Loach, Ken Russell, and Peter Watkins. She read extensively about cinema, and, starting in the mid-1970s, interested in matters related to perception, she created her first films. She founded, along with her partner, the filmmaker and scholar Alain-Alcide Sudre, the Archives du Film Expérimental d’Avignon, a collection of unreleased films and rare documents now preserved at Light Cone (Paris). Later, she also authored a PhD thesis on experimental film as a tool for researching vision, and she taught Theory and Aesthetics of Experimental Cinema at the University of Paris (1996-2005).
Her debut series, Loops (1976-1977), was created by working directly on film and is currently available in a shortened version composed by Lowder. Loops is a study both on the creation of images as visual effects existing only on screen during the projection and on the gap between what is seen and what is perceived depending on the arrangement of elements on the film. This kind of approach was used for many of the films she directed later, in which images are generated on the screen based on the viewer’s perception.
Lowder is the author of about sixty films, all shot using only16mm film, thus showing the importance of the material dimension in her work. Despite the influence of historical and aesthetic reference points—from Maya Deren to the aforementioned Breer and Peter Kubelka—her works remain very personal.
Her filmography is centered on the natural world, seen from a clear ecological perspective, which reflects her way of being and living, both as an individual and as an artist. Lowder seems to merge with her cinema: she has an almost osmotic relationship with the camera and her subjects, upon which she exerts no force, simply waiting for the right moment to capture their phenomenal reality.
In what is to date a unique chance in Italy, Archivio Aperto presents a range of movies in three programs, featuring the famous series of “bouquets”, directed by Lowder starting from 1994. From Lowder’s point of view, films are more similar to experiments than completed works. From this perspective, these Bouquets present themselves as ‘laboratories’ in which nature is explored, frame after frame, in a play between the variations of the outdoor filming conditions and the precision of the technique.
As a result, an impressionistic perspective that observes the randomness of life intertwines with the precision of a rule that the filmmaker imposes on herself through the use of her Bolex, like in some kind of weaving work. She carefully chooses which images to shoot and when, using frames left untouched beforehand by capturing them at the right moment, in an extremely efficient use of film. In this way, although each Bouquet is about a minute long, its creation can take days of work or remain uncompleted until there are the right conditions to shoot it. Indeed, Lowder’s end goal is not to reshape the natural elements: she wants to establish a dialogue with the real world. Her goal is to show a vivid and vibrant nature, not to create still lifes. During the screening, like fireworks, the images—ordered with great precision and never overlapping on the film—come alive on the screen, interacting with each other.
Our three programs explore the relationship between the technique and the natural world (mostly, but not only, plants), both as a structural principle (Voliers et coquelicots can be seen as emblematic in that sense) and as a subject, expanding to movies with documentary value (such as Fleur de sel). The other core of our selection is the relationship between chance—which can suddenly break out, changing the real world in unexpected ways, or impromptu (as the title of one of the movies defines it)—and necessity, which permeates the aesthetics of Lowder’s cinema in the form of extremely controlled constructions that create emotional cinematic poetry.
In collaboration with Light Cone.
A special thanks to Vincent Sorrel for his valuable collaboration.
