Sidney Peterson
1905 - 2000The Cage
Sidney Peterson
A soundless film starts in a studio: an artist sits, a nude stands; a page burns, paper cutouts appear, images are distorted. The artist removes his eye; it falls from his hand, seeing images spin as it rolls. A man falls, objects in the studio falls on him, he's not the artist. A woman gets help from a man in a lab coat; he and the man on the floor fight over a shotgun. Outside, in the city, people and cars move backwards. On the street, those from the studio chase a woman who's stolen leeks. In the backward cityscape, they move forward. They run toward a seaside amusement park. The artist follows, his head in a bird cage. He ends up with the woman who went for help; or does he?
The Cage
The Petrified Dog
Sidney Peterson
Marie Hirsh
Chases within chases. A mother runs after a child. A man seems to be pursuing himself. A woman who has been nibbling her lipstick through half of the film is pursued by a man. Scrambled Alice in Wonderland with brutiste soundtrack. The pursuit of art is represented by a painter daubing at a landscape in an empty frame.
The Petrified Dog
The Lead Shoes
Sidney Peterson
In "The Lead Shoes", we can neither thrust in our eyes nor our ears to help us understand how time flows or how space is. Therefore, Peterson forces us to take both space and time as relative experiences. The consistent disorientation in the film and our consistent inability to perceive them in absolute terms become the main subject of the film. Peterson makes us aware that space and time are more complicated than we think they are and they should be experienced in a more open-minded way. —Yoel Meranda
The Lead Shoes
Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur
Sidney Peterson
Peterson based this romantic piece on Balzac’s Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu and Picasso’s Minotauromachie. The film combines a story of the competition for the love of a woman with images of a young girl with a candle wandering through a corridor, a modern adaptation of the mythological Minoan labyrinths.
Mr. Frenhofer and the Minotaur
