ABSTRACT
Rose Lowder's Composed Recurrence is analysed by radical feminist film theorist Lisa Cartwright: “Retour d'un Repère Composé (Composed Recurrence) is a film made by Rose Lowder in France in 1982. The film is composed of a 2 3/4 minute long negative — a shot of a branch before water printed eight times singly, eight times superimposed onto a second print, out of phase (i.e. so that the images don't perfectly match or superimpose on each other) and eight times printed as a triple super-imposition, again out of phase(s). The structure is repeated every 2 1/2 seconds (that is, the initial 2 3/4 minutes mentioned are made up of a segment 2 1/2 seconds long, repeated mechanically) using a verse form called a pantoun, as a device for organizing the sections into units. Beginning by speaking of what Retour is not may not be the most useful way of speaking of the film. The need to speak in the terms of “like” films, however, has to be addressed before going on to the particular ways in which the film functions differently from other experimental film.
