Rose Lowder

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.

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.

"Turbulence was filmed in the medieval town of Alet les Bains [...] In the middle of the peaceful city, with a warm and relaxing climate, known for its thermal baths, one can see [...] a small waterfall, the images of which, as well as the title of the film refer to the present state of the world today." - Light Cone

The latest in an ongoing series of portraits including inventors Maurice Seddon and Hugh de la Cruz. Here, filmmaker Rose Lowder prepares a macrobiotic meal in her tiny flat in Paris in October 2005. As Rose describes what she is cooking and why, we hear about Rose's childhood spent in Peru through to her current life in Avignon and glimpse a singular creator.

The magnificent garden we see in the film is part of the Brière Regional Nature Park, in the heart of the Guérande peninsula (in Loire-Atlantique), and covers over a hectare. Comprising a vegetable garden, an ornamental garden, a copse and two ponds, it is a space in constant flux, but also a visual melting pot that invites cinematic exploration. The film was shot as a tribute to the creators of this beautiful place, Annick Bertrand-Gillen and Yves Gillen.

Far from the reverberations of contemporary society, the Guérande Salt Marshes have a rhythm of their own throughout the year. After winter restoration work, the mosaic of shallow salt pans are prepared, which let water circulate; combined with the effects of the sun and the wind, these allow the salt to crystallize. By the end of the process, as at the end of the film, the fine salt flower crystals float on the surface above the bigger crystals on the bottom in all directions at once.

Bouquets 1-10 is Lowder’s first collection in an ongoing series of one minute episodes, each composed of footage shot around a general geographic location that has been alternately woven, frame by frame, into a single film reel and connected through the interstitial still life image of a flower that cues the beginning of each integrated film Bouquet. Each bouquet of flowers is also a bouquet of frames mingling the plants to be found in a given place with the activities that happen to be there at the time. Lowder uses the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed.

Sources originated from Thomas the Gardener’s wish to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his making vegetable pâté. Leaving urban life behind him in order to renew a relationship with the land, Thomas started up an organic garden in the beautiful area of hot and cold springs, lakes and rivers, in the upper Aude Valley. In the middle of making his pâté, the gardener is surrounded, as the water sources of the Aude river rush by, by one of the sources for his recipies, the flowers and spices from his garden.

The film is composed of twelve reels, each filmed on a different day throughout a six-month period along the eponymous street, joined in a slightly nonchronological order to avoid accentuating anecdotal aspects of the scene. The focus of each image, recorded frame by frame in the camera, is adjusted to highlight different items in each moment.

Six poetic pictures, five based on the sun, the wind and the sea, while the last lingers on a small park left fallow.

BOUQUETS 21-30 is a part of the ecological BOUQUETS series, consisting of one-minute films composed in the camera by weaving the characteristics of different environments with the activities there at the time. The filming basically entails using the film strip as a canvas with the freedom to film frames on any part of the strip in any order, running the film through the camera as many times as needed. Thus each bouquet of flowers is also a unique bouquet of film frames.

An entry, filmed in Italy, Switzerland and France, in Rose Lowder's series collecting one minute episodes, each composed of footage shot around a general geographic location that has been alternately woven, frame by frame, into a single film reel. In spite of its numbering, this collection was completed later than Bouquets 21-30 (delayed, Lowder explains, "by the weather and a series of related technical/aesthetics incidents").

the fishing boats are out in the water the fish are caught. brought into shore the men haul the catch off the boat. the boat once again goes out to catch and the cycle continues. for centuries this pattern has repeated it's cycle like the tides which roll in and out a story which draws its energy from the sun the moon draws the tides the men work and die and it continues take a moment stretch your eyes and imagine just imagine all stories are true. (CB)

The film presents a field of sunflowers. The focus is adjusted frame by frame in succession according to a series of patterns on particular plants situated in different parts of the field. The diverse configurations placed on separate frames of the film strip appear, when projected successively, simultaneously on the screen. Thus, filmed one after another at different focal lengths, the sunflowers combine during projection to form one spatiotemporal image. LES TOURNESOLS COLORES is a capricious version of the film. - Film Makers' Coop

Fugitive images of the northwestern city of France.

In this film Lowder moves away from the notion of a work based on a preconceived filming procedure, adjusting the visual characteristics of the image in order to approach the temporal dimension of a pond full of frogs. In front of creatures that tend to be elusive, how can one record moments that are meaningful? How can one render a living moment visible and connect different recorded moments together?

Couleurs mécaniques presents, in the order they were filmed, six different viewpoints of a merry-go-round. In each case the focus is adjusted so as to select, isolate and inscribe parts of the filmed scene onto the film strip in a way that allows elements of color in movement to be recombined in a particular manner during the projection of the film.

Reel 1 of Gérard Courant's on-going Cinematon series.

"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

Little is necessary for everything to appear differently. The date, the hour, the weather, the space's layout, one's glance or presence of mind . . . can make everything change. The boats sail out of the Vieux port in Marseille to be amongst the poppy fields.