Tonight’s Structuring Strategies lecture and screening series hosts film and video artist Peter Rose to CalArts’ Bijou Theater. The Philadelphia-based filmmaker has made more than 30 films, tapes, performances and installations since 1968.
His earlier works question the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon his own background in mathematics to test the boundaries of strict narrative filmmaking.
Rose then became more interested in language as a subject and reflected that in his projects. According to his website, he began to generate a “substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy.”
Structuring Strategies with Peter Rose
CalArts Bijou Theater
Tonight (Tuesday, Nov. 2)
7 pm
Free
The Peter Rose screening program follows:
The man who could not see far enough, 16mm, 33 min., 1981
The film 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. The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic.
Secondary Currents, 16mm, 16 min., 1982
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.
Odysseus in Ithaca, Video, 5 min., 2006
Odysseus moors his boat in an alien architectural machine, a labyrinth with echoes of De Chirico and Escher- a place of mystery and power where the rules of visual perspective are transformed and another space erupts.
Conflation: Living Above the Store, sound/video installation, 8 min., 2008
A collaborative video installation by Mark Campbell, Peter Rose, and Anthony Angelicola that offers a complex, richly metaphoric reflection on the meanings of the urban/suburban environment. Campbell has built an elaborate architectural model that both mocks and celebrates suburban topography. Rose enclads this structure with a suite of video images that engage the work in a surprising variety of ways, counterpointing a sound score by Angelicola that offers a subtle and nuanced paeon to the ambient sonics of the city.
Omen Video, 10 min. 2001
A set of invocatory stanzas, encounters with the underworld, calligraphic illuminations, flames of shadow: a premonition. It presents us with a series of slow transformations that elude language and that can only be watched with patience, simple moments of observation that witness mysterious conjugations of light and shadow and that seem to speak the language of metaphor
Studies in Transfalumination, Video, 5:30 min., 2008
This work exploits modified flashlights and stripped down video projectors to explore the visual complexities of the ordinary world: a tunnel, a clump of grass, a discarded table, the underside of a bridge, fog, a piece of rock, and a tree. All images were shot in real time- there is no animation. The video is the third in a series of works that explore light and darkness.
The Indeserian Tablets 1-12, Video, 15 min., 2010
The first 12 parts of a prospective 32 part installation that presents an elegiacal, annotated nocturnal portrait of a vanished culture- its language, technology, religious practice, art and poetry- told using transfaluminal strategies.
Metalogue, Video, 3 min., 1996
This has been described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” Digital editing techniques have been used to reflect and refract a complex monologue about memory, time, and language. By embedding the corresponding gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Rose creates a new form of poetry.