THE MAN WHO COULD NOT SEE FAR ENOUGH (Peter Rose, USA, 1981, 16mm)
Description: The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough uses literary, structural, autobiographical, and performance metaphors to construct a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception, and the rapture of space. Spectacular moving multiple images; a physical, almost choreographic sense of camera movement; and massive, resonant sound have inspired critics to call it "stunning" and "hallucinatory." The film ranges in subject from a solar eclipse shot off the coast of Africa to a hand-held filmed ascent of the Golden Gate Bridge, and moves, in spirit, from the deeply personal to the mythic. "The man who could not see far enough" has won major awards of distinction at numerous festivals both here and abroad, including the Oberhausen, Edinburgh, American, and Sydney Film Festivals, has been broadcast nationally, and is in collections at Centre Pompidou in Paris and at Image Forum in Tokyo.
SECONDARY CURRENTS (Peter Rose, USA, 1982/1990, 16mm)
Description: Secondary Currents is a film about the relationships between the mind and language. Delivered by an improbable narrator who speaks an extended assortment of nonsense, it is an "imageless" film in which the shifting relationships between voice-over commentary and subtitled narration constitute a peculiar duet for voice, thought, speech, and sound. A kind of comic opera, the film is a dark metaphor for the order and entropy of language and has been the subject of a number of articles on the use of language in the arts. Percussion is by Jim Meneses.
FILM FOR INVISIBLE INK, CASE NO. 71 (David Gatten, USA, 2006, 16mm)
Description: Just barely a whisper. The minimum density, the slightest shape. A series of measurements, an equation for living. The edge of what matters, the contours of an idea. A selection of coordinates for finding one's way back. The name of the most important person.