CRITICAL COMMENTS
Incantation
”...massive and lovely “
Roger Greenspun, N.Y.Times
Analogies: studies in the movement of time
”When Rose fills the screen with twenty-five images, the experience is akin to music. An image ripples across the screen as a theme echoes across the instruments of an orchestra, giving way to complicated designs, each image an arabesque in a Persian rug."
Noel Carroll, Soho Weekly News
The man who could not see far enough
”Space, sound, and kinaesthetic experience are here explored as a means of going beyond the limits of the self and of perceptible phenomena. Rose integrates theoretical and personal reflections with direct physical involvement in the spaces of the film. His ‘will to know’ draws him into the world and through it, to a dimension of experience which reaches a higher order."
Thelma Schenkel, Millenium Film Journal
”His work asks very serious questions regarding the nature of thought and the meaning of language, while at the same time casting banana peels for unsuspecting minds. At his best Rose displays a virtuosic command of cinematic techniques and a visual and auditory sense bordering on the hallucinatory. “
Thomas Gartside, New Art Examiner
”...a powerfully formal, analytic inquiry into the very nature of vision and cinema..painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things, images that split, multiply, migrate, and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrance..a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical."
Sally Banes, Village Voice
”...miraculous..charged with expectancy..his fastidious gaze lends his subjects the color of myth, and they spread in the viewer’s mind like a fabulous dream."
Mark Stivers, WXPN Express
”...contrasts optical printing with screen imagery as beautifully and poetically as I’ve seen. The film is all about seeing, about magic and about the relationship between film and the eye."
Owen Shapiro
” …mixes words and images with strong grace, exploring ways in which vision can overpower us…stunning. “
Phillip Anderson, Minneapolis City Pages
”...Rose’s work is timeless..in every sense of the word. They continue on in retrospect. His movies are hard to shake..intensely powerful, personal, lucid, and relentless."
Joe Baltake, Phila. Daily News
“'The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough' has an epic scope and ambition not often seen in independent, experimental film."
David Finkelstein, FilmThreat (full review here)
The Pressures of the Text
”..fast, witty, and relentless..vigorously and accurately deflates academic pretensions."
Helen De Michiel, Afterimage
”Rose’s terrific sense of humor and genius at timing make him a cross between an intellectual Eddie Murphy and an old-time vaudeville comedian with a Ph.D."
Ann-Sargent Wooster, Afterimage
”This acute and logical parody of newspeak of every kind bites, like Ouroboros, its own tail."
Erik Daams, Worldwide Video Festival
”As Rose sits before his tape deck, gathering dust and harvesting confusion, he ponders the way a word can seem both phenomenological and polemically encoded, and The Pleasures of the Text takes on the character of a deconstructivist ‘Krapp’s Last Tape.’"
Jay Carr, Boston Globe
Babel
”Rose is the Andy Kaufman of avant-garde movies, a filmmaker-performer who speaks in tongues to make us hear English with a clear ear. Babel is a hybrid of The Outer LImits and SCTV in which Rose bravely diagrams the language of politics and the politics of language."
Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
”The most compelling piece in the (National Video) festival…a work of efficacious political art which is also sensuously luscious and rich in ironic humor."
Christine Tamblyn, Afterimage
Foit Yet Cleem Triavith
”Provocative juxtapositions of text to image, image to image, and text to text..evoke something of time’s elusive nature…a poetic and multilayered investigation…"
Paula Marincola, Artforum
Omen
”‘Immensity illumines me.’ –Giuseppe Ungaretti. The gradients of Peter Rose’s light play move gracefully from cloud shifting shadows to the chiaroscuro of Piranesian subterranea."
Steve Ausbury, Cinematexas
Pneumenon
”The only piece among the six that carries the mind beyond the technological imperative is Peter Rose’s Pneumenon. In technical terms, this double-screen projection appears to be the least complicated of the six. Rose photographed a flapping blue tarpaulin that rises in a breeze to partially reveal a campground scene. Then a fan clicks on, and the supple fabric screen itself rises to reveal, behind it, a gothic image of a small tree illuminated by shards of light, a Rose trademark. This mask-behind-the-masK tactic may be, like the kaleidoscopic and “impressionist” videos, another old chestnut, but it reveals the dichotomy between reality and illusion dramatically, in a way that stands up under cyclic repetition. Rose has always used video technique to create content – never, like his colleagues in this show, as a substitute for it. That’s why his piece alone lingers in the mind as something more than a demonstration of style over substance."
Ed Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer
Siren
” …poetry of the ear, delightful voice games of timbre, repetition and mis-reading that toss the fulsome text into a succulent, auditory fruit salad….packed with wit and audio-visual puns, the performance equivalent of giving your eyes and ears a Swiss needle shower."
Laurie Horn, Miami-Herald
Incantation
”...massive and lovely “
Roger Greenspun, N.Y.Times
Analogies: studies in the movement of time
”When Rose fills the screen with twenty-five images, the experience is akin to music. An image ripples across the screen as a theme echoes across the instruments of an orchestra, giving way to complicated designs, each image an arabesque in a Persian rug."
Noel Carroll, Soho Weekly News
The man who could not see far enough
”Space, sound, and kinaesthetic experience are here explored as a means of going beyond the limits of the self and of perceptible phenomena. Rose integrates theoretical and personal reflections with direct physical involvement in the spaces of the film. His ‘will to know’ draws him into the world and through it, to a dimension of experience which reaches a higher order."
Thelma Schenkel, Millenium Film Journal
”His work asks very serious questions regarding the nature of thought and the meaning of language, while at the same time casting banana peels for unsuspecting minds. At his best Rose displays a virtuosic command of cinematic techniques and a visual and auditory sense bordering on the hallucinatory. “
Thomas Gartside, New Art Examiner
”...a powerfully formal, analytic inquiry into the very nature of vision and cinema..painfully beautiful images of mysterious events and things, images that split, multiply, migrate, and quiver with a hallucinatory vibrance..a rich fabric interlacing the metaphysical with the ironical."
Sally Banes, Village Voice
”...miraculous..charged with expectancy..his fastidious gaze lends his subjects the color of myth, and they spread in the viewer’s mind like a fabulous dream."
Mark Stivers, WXPN Express
”...contrasts optical printing with screen imagery as beautifully and poetically as I’ve seen. The film is all about seeing, about magic and about the relationship between film and the eye."
Owen Shapiro
” …mixes words and images with strong grace, exploring ways in which vision can overpower us…stunning. “
Phillip Anderson, Minneapolis City Pages
”...Rose’s work is timeless..in every sense of the word. They continue on in retrospect. His movies are hard to shake..intensely powerful, personal, lucid, and relentless."
Joe Baltake, Phila. Daily News
“'The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough' has an epic scope and ambition not often seen in independent, experimental film."
David Finkelstein, FilmThreat (full review here)
The Pressures of the Text
”..fast, witty, and relentless..vigorously and accurately deflates academic pretensions."
Helen De Michiel, Afterimage
”Rose’s terrific sense of humor and genius at timing make him a cross between an intellectual Eddie Murphy and an old-time vaudeville comedian with a Ph.D."
Ann-Sargent Wooster, Afterimage
”This acute and logical parody of newspeak of every kind bites, like Ouroboros, its own tail."
Erik Daams, Worldwide Video Festival
”As Rose sits before his tape deck, gathering dust and harvesting confusion, he ponders the way a word can seem both phenomenological and polemically encoded, and The Pleasures of the Text takes on the character of a deconstructivist ‘Krapp’s Last Tape.’"
Jay Carr, Boston Globe
Babel
”Rose is the Andy Kaufman of avant-garde movies, a filmmaker-performer who speaks in tongues to make us hear English with a clear ear. Babel is a hybrid of The Outer LImits and SCTV in which Rose bravely diagrams the language of politics and the politics of language."
Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
”The most compelling piece in the (National Video) festival…a work of efficacious political art which is also sensuously luscious and rich in ironic humor."
Christine Tamblyn, Afterimage
Foit Yet Cleem Triavith
”Provocative juxtapositions of text to image, image to image, and text to text..evoke something of time’s elusive nature…a poetic and multilayered investigation…"
Paula Marincola, Artforum
Omen
”‘Immensity illumines me.’ –Giuseppe Ungaretti. The gradients of Peter Rose’s light play move gracefully from cloud shifting shadows to the chiaroscuro of Piranesian subterranea."
Steve Ausbury, Cinematexas
Pneumenon
”The only piece among the six that carries the mind beyond the technological imperative is Peter Rose’s Pneumenon. In technical terms, this double-screen projection appears to be the least complicated of the six. Rose photographed a flapping blue tarpaulin that rises in a breeze to partially reveal a campground scene. Then a fan clicks on, and the supple fabric screen itself rises to reveal, behind it, a gothic image of a small tree illuminated by shards of light, a Rose trademark. This mask-behind-the-masK tactic may be, like the kaleidoscopic and “impressionist” videos, another old chestnut, but it reveals the dichotomy between reality and illusion dramatically, in a way that stands up under cyclic repetition. Rose has always used video technique to create content – never, like his colleagues in this show, as a substitute for it. That’s why his piece alone lingers in the mind as something more than a demonstration of style over substance."
Ed Sozanski, Philadelphia Inquirer
Siren
” …poetry of the ear, delightful voice games of timbre, repetition and mis-reading that toss the fulsome text into a succulent, auditory fruit salad….packed with wit and audio-visual puns, the performance equivalent of giving your eyes and ears a Swiss needle shower."
Laurie Horn, Miami-Herald