Sidney Peterson

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Peterson based this romantic piece on Balzac’s Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu and Picasso’s Minotauromachie. The film combines a story of the competition for the love of a woman with images of a young girl with a candle wandering through a corridor, a modern adaptation of the mythological Minoan labyrinths.

A short animated biopic of popular and fashionable French painter Raoul Dufy.

Directed by Sidney Peterson and Alan Zaslove.

A soundless mix of story fragments and images. Initially, images of death, a man with a guitar, a soirée. Some images are surreal: an older woman eats a leaf; a headless man pours a cocktail into his body.

There is a wild sound in the streets where once bells called men to prayer and choruses chanted in march time to the decibels of an infernal brimstone cacophony from which the damned in a Boschean hell sought refuge in the solitude of the philosopher's egg, the transparent bubble of the alchemical Hermetic vessel. MAN IN A BUBBLE is a short documentary about personal acoustical space in an age of intolerable noise. Some stuff their ears against the electronic smog. Others wear headphones. A few scream and very few begin to discern in the deafening uproar the emergence of a Tondichtung worthy of the urban primitivism which gives birth to it. The film was shot in Chicago and New York.

A soundless film starts in a studio: an artist sits, a nude stands; a page burns, paper cutouts appear, images are distorted. The artist removes his eye; it falls from his hand, seeing images spin as it rolls. A man falls, objects in the studio falls on him, he's not the artist. A woman gets help from a man in a lab coat; he and the man on the floor fight over a shotgun. Outside, in the city, people and cars move backwards. On the street, those from the studio chase a woman who's stolen leeks. In the backward cityscape, they move forward. They run toward a seaside amusement park. The artist follows, his head in a bird cage. He ends up with the woman who went for help; or does he?

A choreographic interpretation of a dancer's anxiety before starting her theater routine.

Chases within chases. A mother runs after a child. A man seems to be pursuing himself. A woman who has been nibbling her lipstick through half of the film is pursued by a man. Scrambled Alice in Wonderland with brutiste soundtrack. The pursuit of art is represented by a painter daubing at a landscape in an empty frame.

A short film comparing the tops of New York skyscrapers with the styles of hats, made for New York’s Museum of Modern Art

A comically solemn dance film composed of superimposed images.

In "The Lead Shoes", we can neither thrust in our eyes nor our ears to help us understand how time flows or how space is. Therefore, Peterson forces us to take both space and time as relative experiences. The consistent disorientation in the film and our consistent inability to perceive them in absolute terms become the main subject of the film. Peterson makes us aware that space and time are more complicated than we think they are and they should be experienced in a more open-minded way. —Yoel Meranda