Uses - Text 7
Rose Lowder, whose work is closely connected with manipulation of the Bolex camera[2], was inspired by the camera’s features to create Roulement, rouerie, aubage (1978), believing that there are two realities: the reality one films, and that of the camera. This dialogue with the camera creates the possibility of entering another temporal space, using its mechanical features to fold time and space and slip from the figurative to a more abstract world.[3] For this film, she used a mechanical Bolex H16 RX, but for many others, shot frame by frame (1,440 frames per film), she used an electric camera, the Bolex EL, and a “remote control unit/timer” which enabled her to verify the preceding and following shot by counting the frames very precisely. In this case the little Bolex took on some of the features of an optical printer, something usually found in a film laboratory but which Lowder could take with her into the field. For Voiliers et coquelicots (2001), Lowder shot two frames of poppies in May, when they were in bloom, then left the next photogram unexposed, enabling her in July to film sailboats leaving the port of Marseille, alternating with the flowers. The work of connecting the flowers and boats was done in-camera: there was no editing. Our retina, like the camera, is stimulated intermittently. Lowder uses her understanding of the tool and of human vision to create a perceptual effect. The photograms proceed one after the other on the film stock; there is no superimposition, but on screen the images overlap, and for viewers “on screen, the series of sailboats slips into the field of poppies.”[4] In her Bouquets series (1994-95), she shot flowers and landscapes, frame by frame, at different moments or from a different perspective. The editing was carried out entirely in-camera to create a “bouquet of images” out of this accumulation of photograms. When the film is screened it shows an interspersion of flowers and weeds, flowering and coming into leaf, as time and space are splintered.
