For his first film Peterson collaborated with fellow experimental filmmaker James Broughton. Inspired by the exhuming of a San Francisco cemetery the two men set out to “try every trick the camera knew.”  Chronicling a man’s exploration of a decrepit house populated by aging women, The Potted Psalm divides the protagonist into both a young man and a headless figure, revealing Peterson’s interest in the depersonalization of character, which would continue throughout his career. Using intense close-ups and a disjointed narrative, Peterson combines the erotic with the decaying in this depiction of Freudian desires.

Shot in collaboration with a class at the California School of Fine Arts, The Cage strikes a delicate balance between comedic absurdity and horrific tactility. An examination of the artistic condition and disjointed perspectives, the film depicts a tortured artist removing his own eye. This artistic act quickly transforms into an urban adventure as the eye escapes and travels through San Francisco in the tradition of the City Symphony. Cutting between the perspectives of both the artist and the disembodied eye, The Cage asks provocative questions about artistic agency and identity.

For his most famous and compelling film Sidney Peterson drew upon folklore and mythology. In this adaptation of both the Oedipus myth and the ballads “Edward” and “The Three Ravens,” Peterson replaced the blinded Oedipus of lore with a drowned deep-sea diver. As renditions of the ballads wail on the soundtrack, a modern-day version of the mythical Jocasta attempts to drag the diver’s weighted body through the city. Peterson combined these textual references with images of ritual and game playing in an exploration of over-arching cultural concepts and themes unbound by narrative specificity.

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. Peterson’s experimentation with visual distortion and anamorphic lenses reaches its pinnacle in this seductive and romanticized film.