Directors in Focus: Peter Rose
Peter Rose is a professor in the Media Arts department at the University of the Arts. His works in film, video, installation and performance have received extensive national and international exhibition, including shows at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
For over forty years I have been wending my way through the land of cinema, fording the rivers of technology, climbing the arboreal labyrinths of structuralism, exploring the hidden chambers of metaphor, and playing games with time, space, light and landscape as they presented themselves. My tactics have been formal, but my ambitions have been irony, poetry, wit, and spectacle, and so these works aren’t easily pigeon-holed, ranging from maniacal deconstructions of language to speechless acts of witness to strange performances with flashlights. The two programs offer thematic summaries of my work. The first is comprised of seven elements of a thirteen part meditation on language entitled VOX; the second eschews language almost altogether to show us things we’ve not seen. – Peter Rose
Program 1: Tongue Ties
Saturday, March 3 at 5pm
Tongue Ties offers a circumnavigation of the subject of language. By turns it is a reflexive riff on reading, homage to the passing of film, a hyper dimensional performance piece, an edenic parable, a zen koan, an arch ideological satire, and a performance piece about communication. There are reflections on time and language and there are explorations of the places where speech and power seem to intersect.
Secondary Currents
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1982, 16 mins, 16mm, color
SpiritMatters
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1985, 5 mins, 16mm, color
Metalogue
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1996, 3 mins, DVD, color
The Gift
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1993, 6 mins, DVD, color
Digital Speech
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1984, 13 mins, DVD, color
Babel
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1987, 17 mins, DVD, color
Pressures of the Text
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1983, 17 mins, DVD, color
followed at 7pm by
Program 2: Sight Songs
Sight Songs is a suite of films and videos that concern themselves with dimensional explorations of time and space, with occulting the usual visual modalities and constructing other kinds of vision using the tools of cinema. These works explore multi-temporalities of movement, the raptures of vision, the American landscape, the machineries of the sky, the corridors of the underground, and the powers of darkness, in no particular order. In contrast to Tongue Ties, they lack almost all traces of language and appeal to the formal, the specular, and the kinetic.
The man who could not see far enough
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1981, 33 mins, 16mm, color
Pneumenon
dir. Peter Rose, US, 2003, 5 mins, DVD, color
Odysseus in Ithaca
dir. Peter Rose, US, 2006, 5 mins, DVD, color
Omen
dir. Peter Rose, US, 2000, 10 mins, DVD, color
Incantation
dir. Peter Rose, US, 1970, 8 mins,16mm, color
Studies in Transfalumination
dir. Peter Rose, US, 2008, 5 mins, DVD, color
The Indeserian Tablets
dir. Peter Rose, US, 2011, 14 mins, DVD, color
