Bouquets 31-40 (Rose Lowder, 2014-2022) (Patreon)

For those of you unfamiliar with Rose Lowder's work, I have written about an earlier set of Bouquets about ten years ago. For decades, she was used a meticulous frame-by-frame exposure method. This often results in a jittery form of animation, all the more pronounced because she applies this technique mostly to shots of wildflowers. Although they sway in the wind, these flowers are relatively static, and the motion with which Lowder infuses them transforms nature from object to subject, giving it an active pictorial power.

Just recently, Lowder released her fourth collection of Bouquets, numbers 31-40. And although her overall approach remains the same -- handheld, in-camera editing, liberal use of pulse and flicker -- the series has evolved quite a bit. The juddering flowers are still there, but now they serve less as the primary focus and more like a backbeat, against which she examines somewhat different visual subjects.

For instance, we see a lot more medium and long shots of Lowder's yard and garden. There are relatively extended shots that do not use frame-by-frame advancement and therefore allow the eye to momentarily rest. We see a black cat enjoying a sunny day (#31), a swarm of pollinators tending to a bed of daffodils (#32), and even a steady gaze at a basking pile or turtles (#34). But at other points, Lowder photographs objects whose natural motion mimics her cinematic staccato, such as an oscillating sprinkler (#33), and in several cases, butterflies lighting on flowers (#34, 36).

But gradually, the Bouquets give us much more human activity. Some, like the scenes described above, confront people's movements with her standard pulsating time-lapses, like a long look at people on a bike trail (#37) in which the stopping and starting of the camera produces the disappearances of various bikers. But in the last three Bouquets Lowder takes her camera inside, producing some of the series' only engagement with interiors. #38 echoes the bicycle theme of the previous film, by showing us a bike leaning in an entryway, a signal that we are heading inside.

#38 has some of the most varied imagery I've seen in a single Lowder film. It begins with a close-up of a flower poised against a dark exterior window, but then focuses on moving shadow patterns on the floor, and ends with shoppers in a village. In #39 (so new it doesn't have a title card, incidentally), we see a crane hoisting lumber on a construction site, so while we are back outside, the film explicitly alludes to human dwelling.

And the final Bouquet has no flowers at all, no sunlight or natural forms. Instead, it is a close-up of a leather worker in his shop, making what looks to be either a belt or a sandal. This is an oddly Beaverseque image for Lowder, although if this turns out to be the final Bouquet (I'm not sure what Lowder's plans are), it is a surprising but oddly apposite conclusion. Like the leather worker, Lowder has spend years using her craftsmanship to shape organic material into something recognizably hand-tooled, a functional kind of cinema that deeply respects its raw materials.