Haunted Intimacies, Flickering Melancholy and the Black Queer Imaginary in the Films of Edward Owens
The series Edward Owens: Promise and Remembrance is showing on Mubi starting February 7, 2022.Remembrance: A Portrait StudyThe films of Edward Owens are visual recordings of haunted intimacies. Between ephemeral appearances and accumulative recurrences, his images conjure a tangle of frustrated desires and pensive longings. The uncanny expressivity of his cinema courts disintegration, offering up faces and bodies in pieces, and multiplied across the screen. Through an intricate interplay of photographic stillness and the mobilities of film, Owens charted out a unique visual grammar by claiming an inheritance of sources ranging between the experimental stylings of New American Cinema, fragments of Black sociality, 19th century European paintings, and 1960s pop songs.His four works—Autre fois j’ai aimé une femme (1966), Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1966), Tomorrow’s Promise (1967) and Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967)—were all made when the Black queer artist was only in his late teens. Owens was born...
- 2/7/2022
- MUBI
Working on and scanning through Bad Lit’s Underground Film Timeline periodically, I am continually struck and impressed by the strong efforts of a certain, key few individuals who have both set down an official historical course and have charted a definitive future for avant-garde and experimental film. Without these individuals’ efforts, perhaps there would not be a history for me to attempt to chronicle on this website.
Typically, these individuals have worn multiple hats in their artistic careers, serving as filmmakers, curators, lecturers, journalists and such. While much of their work was about promoting underground film as a valid and to-be-respected art form, there is also a strong component — if not a guiding component — of self-preservation.
That is not to imply a disparagement on their accomplishments as being merely self-serving, but the survival of the one does lead to a survival of the many. That is, if one can...
Typically, these individuals have worn multiple hats in their artistic careers, serving as filmmakers, curators, lecturers, journalists and such. While much of their work was about promoting underground film as a valid and to-be-respected art form, there is also a strong component — if not a guiding component — of self-preservation.
That is not to imply a disparagement on their accomplishments as being merely self-serving, but the survival of the one does lead to a survival of the many. That is, if one can...
- 11/2/2011
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
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