Friday, April 7 at 8pm | By the age of twenty-one, Chicago 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 35 years. 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.
Program: AUTRE FOIS J’AI AIMÉ UNE FEMME (pictured, 1966, 24 min.), TOMORROW’S PROMISE (1967, 42 min), REMEMBRANCE: A PORTRAIT STUDY (1967, 6 min.), PRIVATE IMAGININGS AND NARRATIVE FACTS (1968–7, 9 min.) (Kyle Westphal, Chicago Film Society)
Restored 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 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.
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