TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

A Film Camera Put to Non-standard Use: Rose Lowder and the Bolex H16, by Éric Thouvenel

Rose Lowder was born in 1941 in Peru. After studies in the visual arts, in the 1960s she worked as an editor in the British film and television industries. At that time she also discovered experimental cinema, in particular through screenings organized at the Better Books bookshop, and then at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op. In the 1970s, Lowder relocated to France and began to create a body of work created entirely in 16 mm. As it was for many experimental filmmakers at the time, her favourite camera was the Bolex H16.

Rose Lowder's films are arranged directly in the camera, i.e. without editing in the usual sense of the word. Instead, they are organized according to a precise and rigorous scheme, which the Bolex mechanism enabled her to develop, while bypassing the camera's standard operation.

Lowder’s shooting techniques came out of her thinking around the gaps between the images as they are physically set down on the film stock and visually perceived by the viewer. This method involved conceiving the film’s composition photogram by photogram, facilitated by the great degree of precision of some mechanical Bolex cameras, which were equipped with a frame counter and a solid system for pulling the film through the camera’s channel (unlike motorized Bolexes, which could come to a halt while shooting frame by frame).

Lowder thus mostly used a Bolex H16 with a hand crank. Gradually, over the course of her work, she realized that it was possible to expose isolated photograms anywhere along the film strip by “navigating” along the film stock with the crank. It thus became possible to record an image at a position P1 on the film strip, then advance to P5, P30 or P179, etc. to record another, possibly with different visual qualities – shot scale, focal distance, etc. – but also to back up on the film strip, “like in a painting, where you can put spots of colour anywhere on the surface.”^[6]