Review: The Works of Rose Lowder at Doc Films

How watching nature-focused, avant-garde cinema cured me from the cold weather.

The week before last saw a brief end to the merciless cold weather, right as Doc Films, the University of Chicago’s (UChicago’s) student-led and volunteer-run cinema and film society, wrapped up its Rose Lowder short film screening series, Cinema’s Garden: The Films of Rose Lowder. I was able to catch a show last month, when the weather was below zero and there was no better way to spend the evening than at the cinema. As it was snowing outside, the trees leafless in the wintertime, I was watching photographic sequences of vibrant plants and blooming sunflowers. 

Rose Lowder is a French-Peruvian avant-garde filmmaker. Though primarily known for her experimental films, she also has a background in painting, sculpture, design and drawing. Vibrant and vivid in color and texture, most of her work centers around nature and the environment, showing the change and progression of an image over time through a frame-by-frame technique. 

“The Bouquets are some of Rose’s strongest works and her most famous. I was really struck, though, by her Scènes de la vie française series,” said Olivia Hunter Willke, the programmer of Cinema’s Garden. “It is a marvel how she blends two different times into one continuous space, but also how individual objects in frame sometimes seem outside of both time and space, appearing collage-like, plucked and pasted from somewhere else entirely.”

Lowder’s work screened weekly in parts of January and February at Doc Films, which was officially founded in 1940 as the International House Documentary Film Group, though its origins date back to 1932. The group started showing documentaries, but later expanded to feature and experimental films. Willke has been programming the works of avant-garde filmmakers at Doc Films for the past couple years.

“I started with James Benning, then Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and now Rose Lowder,” Willke said. “It is hard to find filmmakers with a substantial enough filmography to fill nine weeks. Rose is prolific and had enough films to run for six weeks, so we made it work!”

After another programmer’s series got postponed, Willke proposed the Lowder program for the Winter Quarter despite her initial plan to develop it later: “I pasted together a proposal while in the hospital recovering from emergency surgery,” Willke said. “All of the 16mm prints come from one source, Light Cone in Paris, which always makes things simpler.”

Willke was first introduced to Lowder’s work by the Chicago Film Society at their 2023 Celluloid Now showcase where they screened Impromptu (1989). 

“It was included in a block of films concerned with optical soundtracks and all three films/experiential film performances blew me away,” she said. “I immediately fell in love with the tactile nature of Rose’s films, her in-camera editing, how her films are deeply rooted in nature, how she plays with time in distinct settings.”

I enjoyed Lowder’s editing, as well as the vivid, natural elements. The first film shown in the screening I attended, Rue des Teinturiers (1979), was a silent film that featured rapid-moving photography zoomed on a particular plant or silhouette and a blurred busy street in the background. I felt trapped watching the still so close, entranced by the image somehow. 

Silent films are hard for me to focus on. I end up creating my own sound in my head, usually a narrator’s voice describing the scene or saying something inspirational, which was what ended up happening when I was watching this film. 

My internal narrator kept talking about aliens — how this film is probably how aliens see us. That we are hyperfocused on the exact thing that is restricting our view of the larger world out there. Or, on the contrary, maybe we are so focused on the hustle and bustle of daily life that we don’t realize the lives of things that seem mundane to us. But to the plant, that stillness (and the occasional fly) are its entire life. 

The narrator contradicted itself, discussing how the intensifying pace at which each image switches to the next shows that there is no stillness. The plant’s growth goes unnoticed by us typically, but it’s constantly growing and changing. 

This idea came up for me again in Les Tournesols (1982), which focused on a sunflower field. The camera is positioned the same, but the time of day changes and the wind blows more heavily here and there. Sometimes the film would change colors, as well.

After staring at the same visual for quite some time, my mind began to engage with the film differently and I realized the sunflowers kind of looked like breasts. For a minute, I sat in the theater looking at a field of individual boobs. 

In an attempt to find a different interpretation, I asked myself questions like, “Which sunflower is the protagonist?” and thought, “Is it the one in the center, somewhat distant from the camera, with its nipple — I mean face — turned the opposite direction of all the sunflowers? Or the one slightly to the right, but closest to the camera and the least wilted of all the others?”

Quiproquo (1992) had a mix of nature and industrial imagery. I feel like my reaction to this was the opposite of the work’s intention to point out the more abhorrent impacts humanity has had on the world. But instead of feeling sad toward the factories and smog, I felt nothing. The long, drawn-out shots of chain-link fences and zoomed-in streets and railways were boring. 

To me, it was the natural images that felt out of the ordinary. In both Quiproquo and the other Lowder films I saw, seeing the vivid trees and flowers felt more fantastical. Maybe it was because of the winter time, but I also think growing up in the 21st century — where the only world I know is a world in a climate crisis — contributed heavily to my reaction. 

Though this realization was a little bleak, I appreciated the films for prompting my brain to think in such a way. I definitely see myself going back to Doc Films to see more films on the fringe like these on a bigger screen.

As a DePaul student, it was fun to catch a screening at UChicago. People in the audience who didn’t arrive together still seemed to know each other — chatting across seating aisles before the screening began. It was nice to feel like an outsider, both among the audience and in the experience of viewing avant-garde work I knew I wouldn’t understand entirely, but could still resonate with. 

Header Image by Eliot Solomon. Fourteen Cents Banner by Alex Carrasquillo.