APOTHECARY OF TONGUES (AN)

of ROSE Peter

UNITED STATES, 1996, 00:50:00

Production : ROSE Peter
Genre : Filmed action, Video art
Keyword : Communication, Experimental, Humour, Language, Editing, Text

Summary :
Peter Rose’s films and videos are engaged with issues of perception, language, time, and mythos and have led to the generation of new cinematic structures, improvisations in fictitious language, and the invention of obscure journeys.

AN APOTHECARY OF TONGUES include the works :

The Pressures of the Text (1983, 17 min.)
Integrates direct address, invented languages, ideographic subtitles, sign language, and simultaneous translation to investigate the feel and form of sense, the shifting boundaries between meaning and meaninglessness. A parody of art/critspeak, educational instruction, gothic narrative, and pornography, it has been performed as a live work at major media centers and new music festivals in the US and Europe. The piece was written, directed and delivered by Peter Rose; co-directed by Jessie Jane Lewis; with sign language and ideographic symbols by Jessie Jane Lewis; and with English simultran by Fred Curchack.

The work was featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, won a Red Ribbon at the American Film Festival, and has been awarded major prizes at festivals around the world.

Digital Speech (1984, 13 min.)
Uses a traveler's anecdote, a perverse variant of a classic Zen parable, as a vehicle for an exploration of language, thought, and gesture. The tape plays with the nature of narrative, with ways of telling, performing, and illustrating, and uses nonsense language, scat singing, and video rescan for comic comment.

The tape won the Festival Award at the Three Rivers Arts Festival, the Athens Award at the Athens Video Festival and is in the video collections of the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and Harvard University. Gesticulation is by percussionist Jim Meneses.

Babel (1987, 17 min.)
Uses processed voices, generic babble, kinetic texts, and misleading film and video images to link the linguistic implications of a third nostril to the Tower of Babel and the Strategic Defense Initiative. The tape offers a critique of language as a source of authority and as a form of technology.

Presented at the Polyphonix Festival in Paris, at the New Music America Festival in Philadelphia, at the National Video Festival in Los Angeles, and at the World Music Days festival in Cologne, W. Germany.

Metalogue (1996, 3 min.) has been described as a cross between a “speech” and a “fireworks display.” Digital editing techniques have been used to reflect and refract a complex monolog about memory, time, and language. By embedding the corresponding gestures in a spectacular diachronic array, Rose creates a new form of poetry.

Metalogue won a Bronze Award at the New York Short Film and Video Festival and has been shown at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, the Hamburg Film Festival, and the World Wide Video Festival.

to print