Edward Owens | Tomorrow’s Promise / 1967

the abandonment of now

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Owens (director) Tomorrow’s Promise / 1967

 

Having come to New York through the encouragement of filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, the young teenager Edward Owens, after meeting Marie Mencken, her husband Willard Maas, Andy Warhol, and many others, fell in love with another filmmaker of the day Charles Boultenhouse,  for several decades at that point the lover of film theorist, critic, and poet Parker Tyler. With Tyler’s apparent approval, Owens became something like a polyamorous figure in their lives, obviously causing some tensions. In a letter to Boultenhouse, probably after Owens’ return to Chicago in 1971, he writes in a remaining fragment of a letter, for example, (words in brackets being my own), “[I wish] Parker would disappear so that I might have you. However I could, and would never have wished him harm, I also loved him even though I felt a bit of racial strain in him....”

      It was during this period in 1967 that Owens made his longest and, many agree, his most significant work, Tomorrow’s Promise. As the 18-year-old himself made clear, this is a film about vacantness, and the majority of this film’s frames are projected with an image of ink black darkness, with an occasional popping into sight of a street light, passing cars, a neon sign, or other such images that suggest that we might be traveling the way people in the Midwest did in the 1950s and early 1960s, in near total darkness. It reminded me of my own family’s travels during that time down narrowly paved roads without single sign for long periods of time of any light except for the headlights of the car itself.

       But even longer periods exist with absolutely no interruption of the blackness of the voyage, basically, between the films major two sections, both of them accompanied with contemporary classical music of the day that reminded me some of Morton Feldman or at other moments even John Cage. Owens himself, in a statement that has been reproduced in every discussion of this film, explains some of the structure of the work:

 

“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

    It is almost as if we first get to know the two figures through the camera’s exploration of their bodily orifices, the aspects of their faces—noses, mouths, eyes—their breasts—the only time that we actually see any true evidence that one of the two is a woman—before we journey down to their hips, legs, and feet. We meet them, so to speak, in the raw, at one point the male vaguely (since all images are presented as if “through a glass darkly”) reveals his penis, itself slowly moving toward erection...or apophysis.

     The music suddenly ceases and we enter what I shall describe as the long black “middle” section of the work that I spoke of, a period in which we are most literally kept “in the dark,” with only  our imaginations to tell us what these two figures might mean to each other or if they are traveling through space on long voyages—whether it be in dreams or in real life—where they are going and why. The few images that begin to appear out of that darkness suggest a world of drugs (represented, rather campily, with the book cover of Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls and through occasional strobe lights), the sounds of pleading (through images of Ingre’s Jupiter and Thetis, recreating the instance when the sea nymph pleads with Jupiter to protect her son Achilles in the battles of the  Trojan War), and glimpses of Greta Garbo, a “star” attempting to lose her celebrity to the dark quietude of disappearing from public view. These three aspects of living which one might describe as the survival of love and beauty, the search for a way out in dreams and drugs, and the final denial of public life appear to be related to the difficulties the early couple we met who are now married.

       After a few moments of seeming celebration after their marriage, the couple go through difficult moments, which we are shown particularly in images of the bride in shock and suffering and the face-to-face encounters between the couple before their final break up symbolized the flashing exit sign.

      In short, Owens plays out their typical dilemma, as J. Hoberman has described it, “their breakup is being played out on a mock-cosmic level,” a divorce performed in almost operatic terms.

       But why should this film, other than its instances of male and female nudity, and its somewhat campy presentation of American divorce, be of any substantial interest to LGBTQ moviegoers?

       Even the director seems to have had some reservations about his major work. Writing Boultenhouse after he had returned to Chicago after having attempted suicide in New York, and while he still debating an eventual return, Owens wrote, again in a fragment:

 

“...you see, I had this utterly ridiculous idea of returning to NYC, to pick up the camera and some of my things (and for God’s sake Charles, don’t continue those wishful sighs of relief) planing [sic] to film in Chicago, hell, do commercials make money, etc., ah such thoughts, hopes until for some strange reason I just happened to look about me at the people and the landscape and realize how senseless filming there would be. I mean really, I’d be forever tur[n]ing [sic] out versions of Tomorrow’s Promise which idea and thought deserve no more thought. I mean as it is I’ll never stop making versions of that piece of.... but to actually use the same landscape and possibly people of a far lower life rank than those semi-charlatans fortunate enough to be case in the drear fucking film is, I think, going just a bit too far. And so my dear you no longer have to concern yourself of my being away from NYC any longer—don’t panic I won’t be on the next train but on some eventual means of travel I definitely will be.”

 

 

      Obviously, we was dissatisfied with the final result. And we can only wonder why? Perhaps it has do to do with the very last sentence of the earlier quote about the structure of the film itself, “but it was my aim to ‘re-create’ the protagonist of my personal life.”

       Who, we might ask, was the protagonist, the suffering woman or her handsome husband. Certainly the gay director gave far more frames to the well-dressed groom than he did to the aggravated bride. But then, as we might suspect, perhaps he identifies with the bride; after all his central figure in the 1966 film I reviewed, Autre fois j’ai aimé une femme was a kind of transgendered figure.

       Fortunately, we have evidence of who he saw as the protagonist in the 1967 work, the first paragraph of the above quote which has never been included in any of the several film statements and comments that I’ve read, but which I found in a file among his fragmented letters. That first paragraph not only tells us who the film’s hero is, but how he imagines her/his personality and vocation.

 

“Tomorrow’s Promise” is an illumed mirror’s reflection so well as ‘within’ the reflection of a vacant woman. A woman (the protagonist) not empty, but affected into simply a ‘closed’ state. An aphidian* by nature, she is far too apathetic to, for the sake of some degree of responsibility in her current love affair, identify herself.

     The hero is the artist: that ‘being’ in progress to beyond nowhere. He who subjects himself to those affinities he knows he must realize in order that his self bear substance; that which each subsequent project is begun; that which is universal—separate yet intrinsic to the soul of the artist; that which must be abandoned after so ebullient an evolution. Realizations being utilized only after the artist has almost for certain seen the morbidity of these same truths, only to blindly, once more stumble across them discovering there is something in the world in its obsequious, vacuum cleaner like search, [he] couldn’t find in these abandoned forms he now holds within his hands. Such a realized truth is that narrative form, vacantness.

      Vacantness is of the film art as atonality is of music. However, the film art (with vacantness) differs from music (with atonality and tonality) by film’s intrinsic nature: visual images recorded in space, and in time. Film art, therefore, is tenurially assigned to far more cogent statements. With its “Divine Recklessness,” the Art of Film, for its own sake, will remain antonymous to all else save its own, ‘illumed reflection’: vacantness.”

     What this generally missing passage suggests to me is that Owens, identifying as the female in his film, apprises her and his role as being the dark reflection of the forceful male figure, who in her/his very role as the mirror that in its existence reveals the light, is unable to act, to create the narrative to sustain the male action. There is a passivity in the film, a non-committalness that,  relating to death, does not provide the energy to create the narrative meaning which would give the other, the marital partner, his purpose in the present meaning of the story. Throughout the second part, the male remains nothing more than an image, the handsome groom appearing most often on the lower left side of the film’s image, while the woman, in reaction, rails and moves her hand beads around.

      It is tempting to see Owen’s own sexuality and role in his sexual relationship with Boultenhouse to be similar, the passive “female” of the two who cannot create an active and forceful union with his lover that he desires. His love, accordingly, is always a promise of “tomorrow” rather than a narrative that actively defines the motion of everyday life. He seems to see the need to become active, to move into cogent narrative recorded in space and time. Even in his private letters to Boultenhouse his seems to declare a shift in his intentions:

 

“Writing to say I want to Fuck you. If you’ll let me. But it must be my way. I’ll bring my phonograph and headphones on my next visit. You’ll get fucked, you’ll get my body, my animal, black dog technique, my cum inside your ass. Then maybe you’ll like me....”**

 

      Obviously something had come between them, something had changed; whether or not that had anything to do with his suicide attempt in a hotel, we can’t know. What we do know is that instead of pleading for the protection Achilles, the beautiful man who loved Patroclus, Owens chose the route through drugs and dreams to disappear from view like Garbo, to hide his youthful star talent under darkness until death.

      This may be a simplistic reading of the psycho-sexual relationship in which he and Boultenhouse were involved, but we can be sure that the apparent heterosexual marriage portrayed in Owens’ Tomorrow’s Promise was not that at all, but a coded film about his personal queer life.

     Owens might be described as queer experimental cinema’s Rimbaud, a young man surely too precocious in a time not even knowledgeable of some of the dilemma’s he was exploring in his art. 

 

*Any of various small, soft-bodied insects of the superfamily Aphidoidea that feed by sucking sap from plants and that can reproduce asexually.

**All passages quoting Owens come from the Edward Owens’ letters to Charles Boultenhouse, archived by The New York Public Library, as part of the “Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers.”

 

Los Angeles, March 10, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).