Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time uses a variety of multiple screen formats to create an intriguing series of visual riddles. The film consists of a series of simple camera movements that are rendered “diachronically”- several different aspects of the action are presented on the screen at once. By playing with time delays between these images, new kinds of space, action, gesture, and temporality have been found. Generated from structural principles, the film is both lyrical and sensual and provokes a new understanding of time and cinema.
The Mathematical Chronotope: Peter Rose and the Critique of Cold Structuralism
In Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (1977), avant-garde director Peter Rose leverages his academic background in mathematics to stage an elegant, rigorous intervention into the landscape of late-twentieth-century American structuralist cinema. Unlike the clinical, often austere material investigations of his contemporaries, Rose infuses his mathematical systems with a distinctly performative and lyrical sensibility. By analyzing and choreographing physical space through a series of dynamic visual lattices, the fourteen-minute work moves beyond a simple investigation of the celluloid apparatus. Instead, it operates as a kinesthetic exploration of temporality, transforming what could have been a cold, academic exercise into a deeply sensual, rhythmic experience of pure cinematic time.
The Duchampian Descent: Diachronic Segmentation and Spatial Rupture
The film initiates its formal project with a deceptively simple record of physical motion: the camera descending a staircase, a deliberate gesture that invokes Marcel Duchamp’s legendary cubist-futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. This foundational sequence is immediately subjected to a process of diachronic division. Utilizing optical printing and complex split-screen configurations, Rose fragments the single, linear camera movement into a simultaneous grid of multiple frames—eventually expanding to a grid of twenty-five distinct screens. Each separate quadrant occupies a different, mathematically calculated time-delay, forcing the unified space of the staircase to disintegrate into an intricate network of delayed gestures, echoes, and spatial abstractions.
The Polyphonic Screen: Noel Carroll and the Orchestral Logic of the Grid
The spectatorial experience of Analogies is profoundly polyphonic, invoking structural analogies to musical counterpoint and symphonic orchestration. As noted by film scholar Noel Carroll, the multiplication of the image across the screen generates a visual rhythm akin to a musical theme rippling across different sections of an orchestra. An action initiated in one frame cascades diachronically across the adjacent cells, creating a wave of gestural echoes. This systemic, wave-like movement transforms the cinematic screen into a dynamic tapestry, where the boundaries between the indexical representation of a walk and abstract, geometric pattern-making are completely dissolved. The film thus challenges classical theories of montage, establishing a parallel form of spatialized, internal editing that occurs simultaneously within a single, complex projection.
The Legacy of Chronophotography: Deconstructing the Deleuzian Movement-Image
Formally, Rose’s work resurrects and recontextualizes the pre-cinematic experiments of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. By isolating the individual, microscopic increments of a physical descent and presenting them side-by-side, Analogies operates as a late-twentieth-century critique of Gilles Deleuze’s “movement-image.” Rather than subordinating time to the requirements of an ongoing narrative action, Rose isolates the cinematic instant, exposing the underlying photographic gaps that construct our perception of continuity. This process of visual dissection reveals the secret mechanics of gesture and consequence, demonstrating that the human experience of space is fundamentally constructed by the synthetic accumulation of fragmented, temporal slices.
The Embryonic Blueprint: From Temporal Systems to Semantic Fragmentation
Though positioned early in his filmography, Analogies stands as a crucial conceptual and formal blueprint for Peter Rose’s later, highly celebrated works, such as The Man Who Could Not See Far Enough (1981) and Secondary Currents (1982). While those subsequent projects shifted their investigative focus toward the limitations of language, translation, and academic obfuscation, Analogies remains his most visually dense, purely kinematic triumph. By demonstrating how the physical, structural manipulation of the frame can expand the range of human sight, Rose created an enduring, beautiful monument of the American avant-garde, offering a radical, timeless vocabulary for understanding the intimate relationship between the human body, the lens, and the inexorable movement of time.
