Rose Lowder was born in 1941 in Lima, Peru. She has made experimental films since the 1970s. After initially studying painting and sculpture in Lima (1957–58), Lowder continued her education in London at Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea School of Art (1960–1964). While in London, she began working as an editor for films and television (1964–1972). The professional field exposed her to both a technical skillset and the abundant waste involved in creative industries. After this period, she and her partner Alain-Alcide Sudre settled in the south of France, together establishing the Archives du Film Expérimental d'Avignon (1982). She lives and works in Avignon today.
Lowder’s earliest films, Boucles (1976-1997), were formal studies of the most basic elements of film: shape, light, color, texture, and movement. She made these works without a camera, instead using clear 16mm film leaders, a hole-puncher, and markers. The hole-punched and drawn-on celluloid engages with a projector as any other film might, but with Lowder’s physical interventions onto the material acting in lieu of any exterior reference a camera might expose. These Boucles (Loops) would become a basis for her films to come, attempts to crystalize the mechanisms of the camera and the way that we perceive visual information in film.
Lowder is most known for often making her films by exposing images frame-by-frame in camera. While her films often focus on the natural world and our relationship and embeddedness to it, her attention to the ecological aspect of filmmaking is not just an aesthetic one. Nothing is wasted or thrown away. She embraces the constraints of the 16mm Bolex camera—it is a stubborn collaborator. While flicker films can often present as chaotic and random, Lowder’s films are preemptively composed. In her published notebooks are scans of her scores. They are meticulous notes that depict a complex methodology that is not only technical but thoroughly biographical and descriptive. She maps out the specific rhythm and composition of frames, while also noting the days of shooting, the specific location, and her reflections on her subjects. Here we can begin to understand more clearly that there is a fecund metaphor for roots within her films. Within each location, each day, each flower, there are whole lifetimes of buildup to encounter.
Through various methods of in-camera editing, such as exposing the film frame-by-frame, toggling the focus between shots, or exposing every other frame of the reel and then rewinding to the beginning to expose the alternate frames, she provides us with a surprising and newfound relation to time and perception. In the span of one second, we see twenty-four images of flowers—different flowers, different times, different lighting. In a second, we see minutes, hours, days, weeks, months passed and returned. The result is a frenetic calmness.
Bouquets 21–30 (Bouquets écologique) (2001–2005) is part of the Bouquets series consisting of one-minute films composed in the camera. Each bouquet is filmed at a specific ecological site: organic farms, a macrobiotic center, an inn, and pastures. The films are aesthetic and political meditations on these ecological sites.
La Source de la Loire (2019–2021) starts in the Ardèche region of France at Mont Gerbier de Jonc, where the Loire River officially starts. The film studies the mouth of the river in silence. The sound of the river meets up with us in the second half of the film.
