Two Pictures started when Carl E. Brown gave me a three-minute reel to shot. My title, Two Pictures refers to the opposition between my austere filming procedures and Carl E. Brown’s much more flamboyant and intuitive shooting and development processes.
I shot this reel in 1994 in Camargue, a territory of swamps and beaches relatively inaccessible. There was blowing a cold wind. In a secluded area along the coast, residents have built in the dunes huts for weekend or summer holidays, roughly constructed, all completed by cisterns to collect rainwater, solar panels to produce electricity, flower gardens with trees surrounded by fences painted in bright colors. The film shows the fuzzy froth, the dike’s road full of potholes, few poles in the coves, sheds and gardens, a curtain at the opening of a window and one of the residents treating his trees, to end on the leaves in the Mistral.
It returns to Carl the choice of high-contrast film and the elaborate shooting processes, developed in black and white chemistry, a dye with tonal sublayers and all kinds of subtractive and additive procedures. The pictorial processes overflow over the soundtrack, thus documenting the processes while producing the film’s sound. The film shows Carl E. Brown’s capacities as colourist. The tones turn from the Céruléum blue to the dark Sienna earth.

Rose Lowder