Rose Lowder
Biography
Rose Lowder (born in 1941 in Miraflores, Lima, Peru) is a French-Peruvian filmmaker. From 1947 to 1958, Lowder studied at the Colegio San Silvestre, Miraflores. She then specialized in painting and sculpture studies in artist’s studios and art schools in Lima, Peru (The Art Center (1951-1957), La Escuela de Bellas Artes (1957-1958) then in London (Regent Street Polytechnic, 1960-1962), Chelsea School of Art (1962-1964). While in London, she pursued artistic practice while working as an editor in the film industry (1964-1972). After 1977, Lowder worked on the visual aspect of the cinematographic process and had Jean Rouch, as well as his department from the Université Paris X, and presented a part of her research for a PhD entitled ‘Le film expérimental en tant qu’instrument de recherche visuelle/Experimental film, a tool for visual research’ (1987). In action since 1977, she has been programming rarely shown films as the co-founder of the Archives du film expérimental d’Avignon (AFEA, 1981), aiming to acquire 16mm films and paper documents, as well as publishing several books; Lowder was thus able to make these works more accessible to the public: ‘La part du visuel, films expérimentaux canadiens/ The Visual Aspect, Canadian expérimental films’ (AFEA, 1991), ‘L’Image en mouvement’ (AFEA, 2002), ‘Images/discours’ (AFEA, 2006). From 1996 to 2005, Lowder was an associate professor at the Université de Paris I and taught practice, history, theory and aesthetics. By focusing her research on visual perception in relation to the cinematographic means of expression, Lowder concentrated on the various ways in which one can alter the graphic and photographic visual features of the images as it metamorphoses in time. As a result of this work, she was able to compose the image in the camera by interweaving the frames as the film strip passes the lens several times. This method of working is meticulous and complex because it consists of recording a series of images, frame by frame, in the camera, in order for them to appear simultaneously when projected on the screen.
Known For & Full Filmography6 Titles
Movie - 1994, 2h 15m • as Herself
The bamboo grove of the Andes. Are we in the East? A market. Hanging clothes, spots of colors. The farm of La Fage.
Movie - 1988, 2h 15m • as Herself
"One year before the massacre of Tian An Men [...] a few hundred meters from this immense square, where the tanks were going to crush the resistance, under the debonair gaze of Mao [...] I was loaned a tiny, autofocus camera, allowing me to shoot without framing, the lens wedged on my right hip. Everything is captured in clusters of images, edited directly into the camera. The diary of a stroller who travels through Beijing on foot and by bicycle - a cyclist among the cyclists who circulate in slow and tight flows." - Sudre
Movie - 1983, 2h 15m • as Herself
Fugitive images of the northwestern city of France.
Movie - 1978, 2h 15m • as N°6
Reel 1 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.
Movie - 1978, 2h 15m • as N°6
Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.
Movie - 2002, 2h 15m • as Herself
Rose Lowder is an artisan of cinema. Her 16mm camera takes the place of a loom for the weaving of images. She has consecrated her life to these tapestries, these embroideries whose motifs have for many years come from nature, in a state of incessant becoming. Like her elders, the Impressionist painters, she renders her bouquets stroke by stroke, image by image, color after color, to give life to her pointillist compositions in motion.