Douglas Messerli | Edward Owens: The Queer Experimental Filmmakers' Rimbaud / 2025

edward owens: the queer experimental filmmakers’ rimbaud

by Douglas Messerli

 

Black queer filmmaker Edward Owens made only four films at the ages of 17 and 18 which today have become central documents in gay experimental filmmaking of the period. But everything regarding this remarkable individual—from the fact that after he was mentored by filmmaker Gregory Markopoulous who brought him to New York and introduced him to some of the major figures of experimental gay filmmaking of the day (Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, Marie Menken, Gregory Battock, and Charles Boultenhouse); that he returned to his home in Chicago and never made another film, pulling away from his art evidently because of his drug addiction and bi-polarism; and, for many years, the simple difficulty of even seeing his films—all helped to make him a mysterious cypher. He died at the age of 60 in 2009 without having the full opportunity to talk about or help to elucidate his early works.

      In many respects, his work contains elements of what I have described as the “coming out” films of the generation that included Markopoulous (b. 1928), Willard Maas (b. 1911), James Broughton (b. 1913), Curtis Harrington (b. 1926), Kenneth Anger (b. 1927), John Schmitz (date unknown), Jacques Demy (1931) and others. These cinema experimentalists whose work first appeared in the late 1940s through the 1960s defined an early version of coming out when, as I have described it previously, there was no “there” to come out “in.” Unlike the second wave of such films which arose around 1998 and is today ubiquitous—in which the male or female individual finally after coming to terms with their sexuality within, reveal it to their friends, family, and the world—these early queer experimentalists found only a void facing them after they had made the nearly unimaginable recognition that they were sexually different from nearly all the others. Who and what were they? And how were they to survive in a truly hostile environment that did not make communication with others easy?

       To a certain degree, the long dark pauses of Owens’ work appears to simulate the closeted angst of films such as Anger’s Fireworks (1949), Demy’s Dead Horizons (1951) and Schmitz’s Voices (1953) in which sleeping figures on narrow beds are forced, through dream images, to come to terms with their former connections with females and their gradual resistance to and removal from heterosexual sex. Alternatives appear in numerous different manifestations, sometimes confusing or even terrifying the sleeper with possibilities of violence and/or death. But even if death occurs, it arrives with the possibility of some sort of resolution or resurrection, at least the love of those who can comprehend the individual’s suffering, his fellow homosexual males or the hovering mother figure who haunts so many of these works in the form of the pièta. Often the figures rise and explore the world around them, but their explorations do not form a coherent narrative as much as they do a series of dream possibilities, variations, often, in a sexual search and discovery.

Los Angeles, August 25, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).