Edward Owens | Autre Fois J'ai Aime Une Femme / 1966

out of the dark

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Owens (director) Autre Fois J'ai Aime Une Femme / 1966

 

    Owens’ films themselves, filled with long silences and blackness, seem to hide his gay identity as much as to reveal it. When they seemingly evoke any coherent revelation, furthermore, the shifting scenes of gender, particularly those of his first film, Autre Fois J'ai Aime Une Femme (1966), make it difficult to even imagine a narrative logic; is the woman he once loved someone from the past before? Are these clues that, as a nonbinary conforming queer, he became interested in men or is it himself who as a gay man he can no longer love? Are these even issues with which we should be concerned?

     Owens’ works, particularly Once I Loved a Woman also features a reclining figure, at one point even laid flat-out on a narrow bed. The sleeper/dreamer calls up strange images of isolated youth, strange male adult figures grouped together, formative literary figures such as D. H. Lawrence, pictures of a young boy representative perhaps of the dreamer himself, a mother, female porn pin-ups from the turn of the century, advertising copy, and a male dressed in women’s undergarments and pearls. 

      Often these figures are superimposed upon one another, but just as often the images appear a sudden blips on the horizon of dreamer’s memory, recurring again and again at unpredictive moments. 

      Most importantly, and in a very different manner from the early “coming out” films of the cinema experimentalists who did such work from 1949 to the mid-1960s is that in these works the bedridden figures seems at moments to be thoroughly enjoying the sexual attentions of a heavily hirsute man who increasingly overlays and envelops the transgender figure on the bed. And while many of these images do seem to call up a sense of the past and attendant nostalgia, perhaps suggesting that the woman he once loved was in fact his mother, they certainly to not project the sense of trauma and angst that we see in films by Anger, Harrington, Demy, and others. 

     As one promotional commentator described this early work, the effect of Owen’s collage as represented in this film creates a space “where every frame pulsates with sumptuous lust,” and there still appears between the patches of dark matter, enough posing, batting of eyelashes, and deep sexual embraces of the femme fatale in the arms of her hairy ape to suggest Fay Wray has found her true lover. Perhaps the group portrait of unidentified men represent the filmmakers who have influenced him or are currently offering up their advice, spinning their way through his dreams like stern taskmasters which the male/female lover basically ignores.

     If nothing else this young dreamer certainly does need a resurrection to save her/him. Indeed we might see all of these images coming out of the darkness as representative of a multitude of simultaneous possibilities. In short, it’s difficult not to see Owens’ film as a lovely send up of the queer filmmakers such as his would-be teacher Markopoulous, Anger, Harrington, and others who helped generate an art that helped those of the next generation to be much more capable of coping as a homosexual being in the late 1960s atmosphere than for those who came before.*

 

Los Angeles, March 9, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).