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David Rodowick Collection

In his prolific and interdisciplinary career as curator, writer, philosopher and professor, among other things, D.N. Rodowick has also produced a signficant body of experimental film and video work. According to the artist, his films "are primarily concerned with process and performance in ways that explore fluid relations between stillness and movement, figuration and abstraction, and the inscription of time in space." Philosophizing with light, color, shadow and the perception of images, he begins by "setting into movement a series of formal parameters and then letting them play themselves out (almost) automatically in relation to randomizing elements." In his films, the moving image is commensurate with a distinct kind of ephemeral and eternal creation.

Better known for his philosophical and academic ponderings of the medium, he is the author of numerous essays and eight books, including most notably What Philosophy Wants from Images (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Elegy for Theory (Harvard University Press, 2014), The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007), and his latest An Education in Judgement: Hannah Arendt and the Humanities, which will be published in 2021.

Rodowick is represented by gallery Campagne Premiere Berlin, and—along with photographer Victor Burgin—was awarded a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in 2016 by the Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago where he is a Distinguished Professor of Cinema and Media Studies. From 2010 - 2013, he was Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard, where he also helped create a new PhD program in Film and Visual Studies. Earlier in his academic career, he was also instrumental in the formation of the film studies program at Yale University and the Department of Film Studies and the Film Study Centre at King's College, University of London. Wen Zhuang, Brittany Gravely

About the Collection

The David Rodowick Collection contains prints, negatives, and sound materials for films Rodowick created in the later 1970s and early 1980s, including Combat Zone (1979), La Rue Sans Peur (3 Propositions) (1980), Southcote Road: Frame Displacement (1982), and Observing Enemy Movements (1980-1981). A list of cataloged titles can be found in the Harvard Library catalog here.

A number of Rodowick's films can be streamed on his Vimeo page. Additional information can be found on his website. LUX in London distributes some of his earlier film work and the digital works are managed by Light Cone.