Born in Oakland, California, November 15, 1905. Attended University of California, Berkeley. Newspaper reporter for Monterey Herald in early 1920s. Lived in Paris and Southern France in late '20s, early '30s, painting and sculpting. Married Ruth Bosley and moved back to Berkeley, California; wife died shortly thereafter. Married Bernice Van Gelder and moved to San Francisco. Ran Workshop 20 at San Francisco Art Institute after World War II. Co-founded Orbit Films with Robert Gardner in 1950 to make documentaries. Museum of Modern Art, New York City: Director of Educational Television production, 1954-1955. Moved family to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he began writing a novel. United Productions of America (UPA), Los Angeles, California: Scriptwriter for animated series on lives of historical figures, especially artists, 1955-1956. Walt Disney Productions, Los Angeles: Scriptwriter and storyboard artist for Fantasia II (never completed), 1957-1958. Returned to San Francisco to finish novel, A Fly in the Pigment, published in 1961.
Pioneer Bay Area Filmmaker Passes Away in New York City.
Sidney Peterson an American Surrealist artist, writer and father of independent and experimental filmmaking in San Francisco, passed away Monday April 24 In New York City. Sidney Peterson with his film The Potted Psalm (1946), made in collaboration with poet James Broughton (1913-1999), explored new frontiers in experimental cinema. Peterson made the San Francisco's first personal art films as demonstrated in The Potted Psalm (1947) and The Cage (1947). These Surrealist classics inaugurated the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in Cinema film series, started by Frank Stauffacher in 1946.
Peterson taught the nation's first fine art filmmaking courses at the California School of Fine Arts (today the San Francisco Art Institute), known as Workshop 20. With his students, Peterson made a series of complex short, non-narrative films that drew inspiration from the psychological landscape of post-WWII San Francisco, figurative abstraction and music concrete. Peterson's best known films from this period are Mr. Frenhofer and the Menotaur (1948) and The Lead Shoes (1949).
"The Lead Shoes proposes a comic vision that is not at all funny. Extravagant, exhausting, open to the fortuitous and the unintended, its picaresque narrative transforms the dark region of unconscious impulse into an intellectual burlesque. The "story" disintegrates into a warped tissue of allusions and visual puns riddled by ellipses and audio-visual shifts."-Stuart Leibman
Peterson was attracted to the Surrealist School of Cinema with its marvelous imagery drawn from the subconscious dream state and its unfamiliar time relationships. In accordance with Surrealist painting, Peterson made films that often distored camera imagery so that the viewer's world became shifted in perspective.
"One thing the Museum of Modern Art taught me was that San Francisco has been an important center of production for short artistic films since the latter 1940's" - Sidney Peterson
Sidney Peterson was born in Oakland, California, November 15, 1905. Attended University of California, Berkeley. He was a newspaper reporter for Monterey Herald in early 1920s. He lived in Paris and Southern France in late ¹20s, early '30s, painting and sculpting. He married Ruth Bosley and moved back to Berkeley, California; wife died shortly thereafter. He married Bernice Van Gelder and moved to San Francisco. Co-founded Orbit Films with Robert Gardner in 1950 to make documentaries. Museum of Modern Art, New York City: Director of Educational Television production, 1954-1955. Moved family to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he began writing a novel. United Productions of America (UPA), Los Angeles, California: Scriptwriter for animated series on lives of historical figures, especially artists, 1955-1956. Walt Disney Productions, Los Angeles: Scriptwriter and storyboard artist for Fantasia II (never completed), 1957-1958. Returned to San Francisco to finish novel, A Fly in the Pigment, published in 1961. Remained in San Francisco, writing and lecturing until he and his wife moved to England in the early '70s.
From England they returned to live in New York City. In 1981 he made a film with Marjorie Keller . Man in the Bubble. His second wife died in 1990. He is survived daughter, Nora, who lives in New York City and he has one grandchild, Kevin.
Rebecca Barton
David Sherman
Dominic Angerame
We were trying to say goodbye to an epoch, the one into which we had been driven in Apollinaire's "Petite Auto."
The adventures of a detached eyeball. Resources limited, content almost unlimited. Most celebrated shot: artist with head in birdcage.
"Marks the emergence of a na�ve-sophisticated style." - S.P., The Dark of the Screen
"[Peterson is] one of the originators of the American avant-garde cinema. The five films he made in San Francisco between 1947 and 1950 have become classics; they have influenced the cinematic education of many of the best filmmakers of subsequent generations." - P. Adams Sitney
"One of the greats, a pioneer of the American experimental film .... With his sharp, proto-Funk assemblages of wild sight-gags and free associations, he celebrated those aspects of the Rene Clair and Buñuel/Dali films that were indebted to the work of Chaplin, Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy." - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, program notes
"Peterson's films affirm the emergence of this new artist, the American experimental filmmaker." - Jon Gartenberg
1947, 16mm, b&w/si, 25m, $75
"A lovely, comically solemn dance film composed of superimposed images." - Vincent Canby, The New York Times
"It's an astonishing little dance film because the film and the ballet are indivisible - neither could exist without the other. It's not just a photographed dance. It's an organic work of art." - Joseph Gelmis, Newsday
1947, 16mm, color/so, 16m, $50
1947, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
Made with James Broughton.
"That was the greatest film we've ever seen." - a solitary couple at the premiere
1947, 16mm, b&w/si, 25m, $75
Scrambled Alice in Wonderland with brutiste track. Pierre Schaeffer (musique concrete) threatened to sue.
"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. The pursuit of art is represented by a painter daubing at a landscape in an empty frame." - TDOTS
1948, 16mm, b&w/so, 18m, $55
"THE LEAD SHOES issued almost totally without flaw ...." - Parker Tyler
1949, 16mm, b&w/so, 18m, $55
Based on Le Chef-d'Oeuvre Inconnu, Balzac's Abstract Expressionist parable.
"... should be studied by experimental filmmakers in every detail." - Parker Tyler
"We are at the crux of Peterson's genius: his ability to formulate a new perspective and to test its implications." - P. Adams Sitney
1949, 16mm, b&w/so, 21m, $60
1954-1955, 35mm, color/so, 8m, $30
1956, 35mm, color/so, 8m, $30
1956, 35mm, color/so, 8m, $30
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.
"Peterson has always been good on street photography, and the fragmented views of New York and Chicago have a jangling abrasive kick." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"I think you've managed one of the happiest most hopeful visions of yr life withOUT one jot of sentimentality to spoil it. The 'dancers'/skaters, each wrapped in his or her own 'bub' is a tough weave of HARD joy ... Bravo!" - Stan Brakhage
1981, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45