Four newly restored films from the latest figure shaking up the film canon: Edward Owens.
- Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966)
- Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967)
- Tomorrow’s Promise (1967)
- Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1968-70)
Our friends at Chicago Film Society write:
“By the age of twenty-one, South Side native 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, and made a quartet 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. Now newly restored, Owens’s work demonstrates the outsized influence of his mentors but also points the way to a uniquely personal and interior cinema — home movie portraits composed with an almost beatific glow, the subjects simultaneously intimate and larger-than-life. As the only known gay Black filmmaker working during the New American Cinema era, Owens’s work is also an invaluable contribution to a renewed survey of the field, a voice almost completely excluded from the established canon of American avant-garde cinema.”
Presented on 16mm prints borrowed from CFS
Doors open at 7:30. Films start at 8:00.
Total runtime of films: about 80 minutes
The 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.
