Rose Lowder’s cinema is one of attention, an attention paid to “nothing extraordinary”, as she modestly puts it in the title of one of her films, but also an attention to detail and to the real seen up-close. The fact that her films feature neither narrative nor linear time reinforces this necessary attention, a particular visual effort that she suggests to viewers without imposing it upon them.

For over 50 years now, Rose Lowder has been filming nature and her immediate surroundings, weaving together images inside her 16mm Bolex camera. A one-minute film is made up of 1440 different images, while Rose Lowder’s shots are sometimes less than one second long: with this approach, she brings about numerous retinal superimpositions that are anything but accidental.

The exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo presents her most recent films alongside The Source of the Loire (La Source de la Loire, 2019-2021). To make this film, each spring for three years in a row, she travelled to the peaceful environs of the Mont Gerbier de Jonc to record and transfigure the babbling course of a tiny stream that is the source of France’s longest river.

This film is accompanied by twenty short films, each a minute long. Displayed together in “bouquets”, they were filmed in sites in the south of France and the north of Italy where biodiversity is preserved and cultivated.