private fictions, collective remembrances. the cinema of edward owens

By the age of twenty-one, Edward Owens had won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied under Gregory Markopoulos, carved out a precarious place among New York’s queer underground, met Andy Warhol, attracted the adulation of Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler, and made a handful of distinctive films that screened around the globe. Then his filmmaking career abruptly stopped, never to resume, while the films remained in the collection of the Film-Makers’ Coop, unrented and unseen for thirty-five years. The mystery of Edward Owens – his distinctive aesthetic, his preternatural command of superimposition, his brief moment at the center of the New American Cinema, and his long orbit into obscurity – has only come into focus in the fifteen years since his death in 2010. Many questions remain unanswered, with speculation and surmise filling in critical gaps. From one perspective, Owens was yet another teenage cineaste who emerged from the tumult of the ’60s, alongside Barbara Rubin, Warren Sonbert, Tom Chomont, and Robert Beavers. Unlike his celebrated contemporaries, Owens was Black, a kid from the South Side of Chicago who had begun exhibiting his paintings, drawings, and collages in the lobbies of the Chales A. Stevens department store and the Carnegie, an art house theater where Owens worked alongside his girlfriend, Gloria Rich, who would go on to star in two of his films. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago enrolled Owens when he was still in high school. Owens’s short time at SAIC overlapped with Markopoulos, who worked two semesters as visiting faculty. Owens shared some of his 8mm films with Markopoulos, who encouraged his pupil to develop his aesthetic, flee Chicago, and return with him to New York. We cannot know exactly which 8mm films Markopoulos viewed or what elements of Owens’s emerging style he praised, but the sample of 8mm work which has recently been recovered, restored, and blown up to 16mm by the Flaxman Library at SAIC is suggestive. In these brief, untitled reels, we see Owens experimenting with the camera, recording events around him (including a Barbra Streisand concert!), and developing an interest in the surface of things, returning again and again to book covers, photographs, and reproductions of paintings with an evident desire to bring the textures of other mediums into the realm of cinema. Many of the images in Owens’s 8mm sketches re-emerge in his 16mm work. His first two 16mm films, Autre fois, j’ai aimé une femme and Tomorrow’s Promise, imitate the carnal classicism of Markopoulos. His last two films, Remembrance: A Portrait Study and Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts go in a different direction, taking the vernacular grammar of Black home movies and crafting loving portraits of Owens's mother and her circle of friends. The soundtrack to Remembrance begins with a spoken introduction by Owens, followed by songs from Marilyn Monroe and Dusty Springfield. To Owens's patrons, his choice of music was contrary to artistic integrity: a silly, campy wallow in pop culture that had no place in the elevated realm of personal cinema. (What would Markopoulos and Tyler have thought of Streisand?) Owens dutifully pretended that the soundtrack did not exist, listing the film as a silent title in the catalog of the Film-Makers' Coop. To restore these films meant literally restoring the sound of Owens's own voice, presenting the films as he once hoped they might be seen and heard.

( Kyle Westphal, Chicago Film Society )

The 16mm Films of Edward Owens were restored in a joint project undertaken by Chicago Film Society, The New American Cinema Group, Inc./The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the John M. Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This project was made possible with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant Program and the Film Foundation. Funding provided by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation. Restoration: BB Optics; Laboratory Services: Colorlab.

The 8mm Films of Edward Owens were restored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, John M. Flaxman Library. Restoration: BB Optics. Laboratory services: Colorlab. 16mm prints courtesy of Chicago Film Society.

All of the original 8mm reels were untitled. Titles come from assigned archival numeration in the Edward Owens Collection, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

With intermission