09.09.2024 | Rose Lowder’s fast-paced slow cinema
Homage | ROSE LOWDER
Born in Peru, Rose Lowder has been working as a curator of film programmes, university lecturer, co-founder of the Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon, book author and filmmaker in France since the late 1970s. Her own works, made exclusively on 16mm – sometimes silent, sometimes with sound or music – captivate above all due to a fascinating examination of the movements, forms, colours and structures of the plant and animal world, but also due to the exploration of the possibilities of handling physical material, montage techniques, focusing, light and space.
We are showing a selection of her work that does not follow the logic of a chronological treatise, but instead aims to create a dialogue between them. In the programme, quintessential examples of her work are placed in rhythmically sensual and thematic relationships. Dedicated to the avant-garde idea of a new way of seeing and experiencing, early colour and movement pattern experiments can be admired in PARCELLE, which then have a significant influence on the ongoing series BOUQUETS, which – in one-minute fragments – catapults flower meadows, people, animals and objects into a furious thrill of images. The enormously high editing frequency, the multiple exposures and the sometimes unusual camera angles and compositions create novel worlds with the means of film art – worlds strangely detached and yet poetically connected with the parameters we are familiar with. In this way, objects are constantly given new meanings: Windsurfers become butterflies or grasses become human hair.
Then, in BEIJING 1988, the urban landscape of Beijing shortly before the Tiananmen protests, with its flags, bicycles and tai chi figures, becomes a bubbling source of inspiration. Finally, RUE DES TEINTURIERS makes the eponymous street dance frame by frame behind a balcony plant and develops a hypnotic pull beyond familiar fields of meaning. A space of immediate experience is created. An ultra-slow cinema of heightened speed and heightened senses, which – cut by cut – saws through the well-worn connecting lines of the meaning machine in our heads. To conclude the programme, LA SOURCE DE LA LOIRE follows the course of the Loire from its source and separates the visual and audio levels. First, we revel in elegiac sunlight, then the film releases us into a utterly black image. Subsequently, we hear the sounds of what we have just seen, while the river keeps flowing in front of our inner eyes, dissolving and flowing together again.
PARCELLE
FR 1979, silent, 3′, 16mm
BOUQUETS 6-10
FR 1994-1995, silent, 5′, 16mm
BOUQUETS 28-30
FR 2005, silent, 4′, 16mm
BEIJING 1988
FR 1988-2011, sound, 12′, 16mm
RUE DES TEINTURIERS
FR 1979, silent, 31′, 16mm
LA SOURCE DE LA LOIRE
FR 2019-2021, sound, 19′, 16mm
| Mon 9. Sept | UT Connewitz |
| 7 pm | In the presence of Rose Lowder € 7 (6 reduced) |
