Since 1968 I've made over thirty short films, videos, performances and installations. My early work drew upon my background in mathematics and explored the boundaries of time, space, and perception. I then became interested in language as a subject and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Simultaneously, I made a number of works that functioned in the public domain: video installations and documentaries on public art.
My ambition these days is to construct cinematic totems, speechless vehicles for encounters with landscape and figure that reinvigorate the possibilities of seeing. Recent videos have explored the liminalities of vision—the optical space that presents itself before (re)cognition kicks in, the borders between light and darkness. I'm interested as well in the edges of things: the highway underpasses, subducted tunnels, and abandoned factories that constitute the unconscious inner life of the city. These spaces, which I have been exploring for thirty years, possess a potency that is almost mythological.
I understand this all as furthering one mission of art, which is not to illustrate what we know but to illuminate what we do not.
Peter Rose's website: www.peterrosepicture.com
Using rapidly edited, superimposed images of plants, trees, water, the sun, and the moon, INCANTATION weaves a dynamic tapestry of organic forms and textures, combining its images with a fierce rhythmic intensity so as to suggest a kind of natural force. The film was shot entirely in 8mm, in camera, according to a pre-arranged score, and then blown up to 16mm using a homemade optical printer. The accompanying sound track, a chant taken from Islamic liturgy, is breath-based, as is much of the underlying structure of the image, and brings the film into the form of a prayer. "... massive and lovely ...." - Roger Greenspun, The New York Times
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Athens Film Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY.
1968-1971, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
Originally undertaken as a portrait of Graham Marks and his work in ceramic sculpture, the film evolved into a meditation on the powers of fire, the nature of the creative act, and the vessels, rooms, and chambers wherein certain transformations take place. The film seeks to provoke a potency, a mystery, by cinematic and poetic means.
"... provocative, surreal meditation ...." - Booklist
"... a mysterious philosophical work [that asserts] the opaque, magical quality of art ...." - Amos Vogel
1975, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
A first experiment in diachronic motion: the simultaneous presentation of an action from several different perspectives in time.
Exhibition: Int'l Film Seminars; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute.
Collection: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1975, 16mm, color/si, 3m, $20
ANALOGIES consists of a series of simple camera movements that are rendered diachronically - several different aspects of the action are shown on the screen at once using multiple screen structures. By playing with the time delays between these images, new kinds of space, action, gesture, and temporality have been found.
"... a sensuous piece of visual music ... staggered imagery in everflowing, Godardian movements, enhanced by sumptuous color and by delayed actions of concentrated rhythmic power." - Amos Vogel
"When Rose fills the screen with 25 images, the experience is akin to music. An image ripples across the screen as a theme echoes across the different instruments of a full orchestra, each image an arabesque in a Persian rug." - Noel Carroll, The Soho Weekly News
Awards: Ann Arbor Film Festival; Second Prize, Athens Film Festival; First Prize, Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Bronze Hugo, Chicago Film Festival; Film as Art, American Film Festival.
1977, 16mm, color/so, 14m, $45
THE MAN WHO ... uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory." The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse to an ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic.
"[A] powerfully formal, analytic inquiry into the nature of vision and cinema ... painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things that split, multiply, migrate and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrance ... a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical." - Sally Banes, The Village Voice
Awards: Special Jury Prize, Festival de la Jeune Cinema, Hyeres, France; Director's Prize, Baltimore Film Festival.
Exhibition: Edinburgh Film Festival; American Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival; Sydney Film Festival.
Collections: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Image Forum, Tokyo
1981, 16mm, color/so, 33m, $100
SECONDARY CURRENTS is a film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language and has been the subject of a number of articles on the use of language in the arts. Percussion by Jim Meneses.
"Prizbah ke no panz fatundo. Elmo cheshkadashi par lo biorn fatooshka! Como cinquema no delamyero sima disi, si cueja filidistro cuamchano mirichi-vasi komino sano dimensia!" - M'hidradane Vododook
Awards: Golden Athena Award, Athens Film Festival; First Prize, Baltimore Film Festival; First Prize, Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Exhibition: Montreal Film Festival; Edinburgh Film Festival.
1982, 16mm, b&w/so, 18m, $55
SPIRIT MATTERS is a silent monologue on the simultaneous perception of space and time. The film was constructed without a camera by writing directly on clear celluloid, and then "translated" by refilming the resulting strips on a light table so that they appear as "subtitles" beneath the original instruction. The film functions as both process and object - an interactive experiment in reading, writing, and seeing.
Exhibition: Baltimore Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Experimental Film Festival.
1984, 16mm, color/si, 6m, $20