Edwards Owens | Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts / 1966

a story without a narrative or even words

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Owens (director) Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts / 1966

 

Originally titled Mildered Owens: Toward Fiction, a smoldering narrative about his mother, the 17-year-old Edward Owens, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts represents a reediting of that work into a kind of imaginative narrative, presumably in New York.

     According to film commentator Ed Halter—the man who helped to rediscover Owens and interviewed him late in his life—these images were shot in Chicago, quite obviously since they are mostly of his mother and other Chicago acquaintances and friends. So unless Owen made a sudden trip back home in 1966, this work presumably is one of the early student efforts that had attracted Gregory Markopolous to his filmmaking in the first place.

       We can see this six-minute, accordingly, as a link from the almost totally non-narrative first film Autre Fois J'ai Aime Une Femme (1966) and the film that struggles with narrative in vacuity, Tomorrow’s Promise (1967). But here we are hardly proffered any blank space, as the images of his mother, other women, and men jostle against one another and are often superimposed upon each other. Despite the fact that this fragment is presented as a “silent film,” many of the figures, particularly his mother are emphatically speaking, addressing an unknown audience about unknowable subjects, Mildered at one point evidently discussing her ring, whose setting she pulls from it. Throughout there seems to be some sort of consternation or even scolding being uttered from the mother’s lips.

       Sometimes, there is the feeling of a fantasy narrative in genesis, and at other times, a sense a remembrance, of nostalgia and longing.

       Charles Boultenhouse—already his lover or soon to be—described Owens’ short work as:

 “A montage of still and moving images, mixing and alternating black people and white people, fantasy and reality, a presidential suite and a mother’s kitchen: a sensitive, poetic evocation in the manner of the film-maker’s Remembrance. Brilliantly colored and nostalgic, it comprises a magical transformation of painterly collage and still photographic sensibility into filmic time and space.”

      It does not take a great deal of imagination to sense that perhaps the images of this film were being shot at a time when the director already knew or sensed that he would be leaving the world he is capturing on film, and there is that sense of frustration between the urge to move on from the apparent statis of several of these figures and already a feeling of irreplaceable loss. Surely, if Owens was already imagining an escape to New York at the time when he caught these images, he could not have imagined if or when he might return.

 

      And there is, in this respect, also a great deal of playfulness with what were obviously fairly humble situations. At several times we see images of women attempting to look like models or celebrities. Stunning baroque-style rooms are counterposed with the humbler surroundings of a woman who appears to be his mother, her head turbaned, sitting in a rattan chair. In several cases these worlds are overlayed upon one another, his family members and friends becoming through the imagistic links kings and queens.

     If Autre Fois J'ai Aime Une Femme was a story without narrative and Tomorrow’s Promise was a narrative with only a minimal amount of images, Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts is a noisy sending-off celebration without sound, a film not only about the present but about these figures’ desires and hopes for the future and perhaps for the prince they are seeing off.

      Even if we take away the notion of the director and his family imagining Owen’s departure, there is a sense throughout this work of something impermeable, transient, and fleeting in his combined images of the real and desire, in the disparity between who each of these figures are and what they would like to be. We surely are witnessing story-telling in the making, only we cannot hear the words nor do we have a narrative; we have only lost the fragments of the story and are forced to imagine that narrative in our mind’s eye.

     Halter, himself describes something similar to what I see in this work: “...achingly silent Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts focuses more directly on his mother, setting her regal depiction amidst delicate pulses of editing and oblique superimpositions, evoking the gap between the homebound realities of life and desires for far-off luxury and refinement.”

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).