Edward Owens
History
Edward Owens was an African American artist and filmmaker. He studied painting and sculpture at SAIC, in addition to making 8mm movies. Encouraged by his mentor, filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, Owens moved to New York City. There he met filmmaker-poet Charles Boultenhouse, with whom Owens became romantically involved. Owens returned to Chicago for personal reasons in 1971, finishing his college degree but never completing another film. The time Owens spent in New York resulted in several films that showcase a unique approach to imagery, lighting, editing, and narrative that defines his brief yet meaningful career.
Director
“A montage of still and moving images, mixing and alternating black people and white people, fantasy and reality, a presidential suite and a mother’s kitchen: a sensitive, poetic evocation in the manner of the film-maker’s Remembrance. Brilliantly colored and nostalgic, it comprises a magical transformation of painterly collage and still photographic sensibility into filmic time and space.” - Charles Boultenhouse
Director
“The music is by Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Running Wild’ from Some Like It Hot, because it’s a film portrait of Nettie Thomas. She did floors in white women’s homes, like black women did to support their families in the olden days. My mother is sitting in a wicker chair with an ostrich feather boa, a grey worsted wool skirt, a silk belt. For her portrait, I used ‘All Cried Out’ by Dusty Springfield...I was advised by Gregory Markopoulos not to play the music. Because Gregory didn’t think it was proper.” - Edward Owens
Director
Colour, Sound, 16mm, 3 minutes.
Writer
“Tomorrow’s Promise is a film about vacantness. Which physically does ‘begin’, reversed, upside down on the screen […] suddenly another such position is taken (not in reverse), this time by a male figure and soon, in this same section, the girl of the reversed image reappears posed in a different way; a way obsessed by ‘mood’. Then a technical play of in-the-camera-editing occurs, more intense, brighter than in the first, reversed section. There are several inter-cuts which serve, in this and each subsequent section unto the end, as relative links into the final section: which is actually the ‘story’. The story the protagonist and her hero try to tell in their way is apophysis; except that ‘pictures’, clear visions take the place of words. My film could have been edited with precise tensions and a lucid straight narrative, but it was my aim to ‘re-create’ the protagonist of my personal life.” - Edward Owens
Director
“Tomorrow’s Promise is a film about vacantness. Which physically does ‘begin’, reversed, upside down on the screen […] suddenly another such position is taken (not in reverse), this time by a male figure and soon, in this same section, the girl of the reversed image reappears posed in a different way; a way obsessed by ‘mood’. Then a technical play of in-the-camera-editing occurs, more intense, brighter than in the first, reversed section. There are several inter-cuts which serve, in this and each subsequent section unto the end, as relative links into the final section: which is actually the ‘story’. The story the protagonist and her hero try to tell in their way is apophysis; except that ‘pictures’, clear visions take the place of words. My film could have been edited with precise tensions and a lucid straight narrative, but it was my aim to ‘re-create’ the protagonist of my personal life.” - Edward Owens
Producer
In November 1966, Mr. Owens completed his first film Autre fois j'ai aimé une femme ("Once I Loved a Woman"), which in its short existence, has had special screenings both at the school of the Institute and Morton Hall, the Second City Film Center, and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque of New York. Upon viewing Autre fois, Gregory J. Markopoulos wrote "[Edward Owens] may well be one of the few for whom 'amateur' and 'professional' need have no significance whatsoever: true to his own native talents, with grim determination uncanny, whether the mind in the arts is for or against beauty or its opposite twin, chaos." —John F. Steward-Butkovich, Brotman & Sherman Theatres
Director
In November 1966, Mr. Owens completed his first film Autre fois j'ai aimé une femme ("Once I Loved a Woman"), which in its short existence, has had special screenings both at the school of the Institute and Morton Hall, the Second City Film Center, and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque of New York. Upon viewing Autre fois, Gregory J. Markopoulos wrote "[Edward Owens] may well be one of the few for whom 'amateur' and 'professional' need have no significance whatsoever: true to his own native talents, with grim determination uncanny, whether the mind in the arts is for or against beauty or its opposite twin, chaos." —John F. Steward-Butkovich, Brotman & Sherman Theatres
