Presented as part of OUT OF THE ARCHIVE: ENVISIONING BLACKNESS

Arrive hungry at 6:15pm for ample pre-show appetizers catered by Oasis!

All films presented on 16mm. Stick around after the show for a post-screening discussion with Emily Martin, moderated by Zachary Vanes

Autre fois, j’ai aimé une femme (Once I Loved a Woman) (1966)

Owens’s first 16mm film, completed when he was only 17, recalls the work of Gregory Markopoulos in its elaborate superimpositions, but Autre fois presents a budding style that is also distinctly Owens’s own—a fragmentary cinema with flashes of photographs, overheard snatches of poetry, and abruptly edited selections from David Amram’s incidental music composed for After the Fall. The French title is an affectation; the film was shot in Chicago using Owens’s friends, including then-girlfriend Gloria Rich.

Tomorrow's Promise (1967)

A rapid maturation of the fleeting and elusive style that Owens deployed in Autre fois months earlier, Tomorrow’s Promise is perhaps his most "conventional" work by the avant-garde standards of its era—a psychosexual exploration with theatrical, neoclassical, and mythopoetic overtones. Described by Owens as a film about vacantness, its form “so chimerical as life itself,” Tomorrow’s Promise plays today as one of the tonier underground movies of the late 1960s.

Remembrance: A Portrait Study (1967)

Shot in Chicago with Owens’s mother, Mildred, and her friends Nettie Thomas and Irene Collins, Remembrance is an exuberant home movie that finds a new, more personal avenue for superimpositions and rapid cutting.

Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts (1968-70)

Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts continues the project of Remembrance, exploring the lives of Owens’s mother and her social circle with a delicate and lyrical assemblage. Originally titled Mildred Owens: Towards Fiction, this silent film was completed sometime around 1970, but not put into distribution until 1983.

The Films of Edward Owens were restored in a joint project undertaken 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. This project was made possible 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. Restoration: BB Optics; Laboratory Services: Colorlab.

For more information about the films and the life and work of Edward Owens, visit thechicagofilmsociety.org.

About Emily Martin

Emily Martin is currently the Distribution Manager at the Video Data Bank and has a Dual MA in Contemporary & Modern Art History and Arts Administration & Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her past experience includes various administrative, programming, and research activities at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Chicago History Museum, and The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University