About Ed Bowes

View the Ed Bowes Archive, presented by Granary Books.

“It’s hard to fit Ed Bowes’ filmmaking into a handy category. It’s like avant-garde cinema perhaps in its rhythms and cutting. But Bowes is a writer and director and cinematographer all at once. He creates characters, with teasing names such as “Constance” and “Reason” and “Trip” and “Trick,” who muse as philosophers might, worrying the placement of objects in space, investigating their own modes of thinking and behavior. He works in high definition video in a fastidious fashion, puzzling many “takes” and angles. One sees colors one has never seen before. Each shot is carefully lit and composed; every sequence meticulously edited. He works with a small crew and with “actors” he calls “presenters.” They are there to present the intelligence of an interiorized, almost sub-vocal language, as well as meditative states of mind. His scripts go against expectations of plot and yet provide coherent narratives, resembling experimental prose-poems. The attention to language is obsessive as he explores cognitive states and self-reflective layers of thinking, narration, temperament, as well as spatial, pictorial and emotional relationships between people themselves and between people and objects and landscapes…. Some have said Bowes’ movies seem an amalgam of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Gertrude Stein, although Picture Book (2005) was partially inspired by Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and Against the Slope of Social Speech (2008) has an affiliation to the letters of Sophie Hawthorne from another century. Bowes is literary in his attractions and has worked with numerous poets and writers over the years including Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Laura Wright, Laird Hunt, Steven Taylor, Lisa Jarnot, and Eleni Sikelianos. He engages them both as actors and collaborators…. People are awed by the beauty of the images, but sometimes confused by the circuituous “narratives.” Some have commented that the experience in watching Bowes’ movies is like being inside consciousness in an astonishingly visceral and provocative way. One enters an alternative world that gets in your ear, your imagination, and under your skin.”

—Anne Waldman, Vanitas magazine, Issue 5, 2010

Ed Bowes is a writer, director and cinematographer, who has been making his own movies for over three decades. His first move Romance was the first full-feature-length narrative shot in black & white video. Subsequent movies have included Better, Stronger and Spitting Glass which was partially funded by Channel 4 in England and shown on major PBS stations throughout the U.S. Bowes worked overseas after the Berlin Wall came down for the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Fund and Interviews, consulting and training at independent television stations in Bosnia, Kazakstan, Russia, Armenia, Croatia, and Macedonia.

Recent projects are the 45 minute The Value of Small Skeletons, a 2012 script co-written with poet Anne Waldman, describing the world, relationships, and interior imagination of a character named Merit, and Akilah Oliver: 3Readings, a portrait of the African American poet (who passed away in February of 2011) through her powerful and moving work. Bowes has worked within the poetry community of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and the film community of the University of Colorado and Free Speech News. His actors have included Laura Wright, Steven Taylor, Michael Jones, Eleni Sikelianos, Reed Bye, Alaina Ferris, Joe Richey, Michelle Ellsworth, Laird Hunt, Oona Fraser, Tara Rynders, HR Hegnauer and many more — and teams from Free Speech TV and CU. Bowes has worked with poets for years, including early work with Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge, and more recent projects with Lisa Jarnot and Akilah Oliver, and texts by Robert Creeley and Eileen Myles, among others, and novelist Laird Hunt. A new movie is in progress entitled Essay on Ash with a script by Laird Hunt with performers HR Hegnauer and Tara Rynders. Bowes has received awards from the NEA, NYSCA, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010).

He lives in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts And spends summers in Boulder, Colorado working on his movie projects.

“It is a new suspension and elongation of vision. In it I saw colors I had never seen before, and I heard language arranged in ways I had not known. I also saw suggestions of how boundaries among people, are crossed, or not, unlike in any film had ever before. The gorgeous strangeness of this film reminds me of Lucretius, who also wanted to know – of what the mind, of what the soul is made,and what is so terrible that breaks on us asleep.”

—Bin Ramke, on Bowes’ movie Against the Slope of Social Speech (2008).

In Grisaille (which is a painterly and stained glass term referring to the use of “gris”: gray) we encounter five figures — all women — or as Bowes calls them “presenters” who seem to overlap and know one another. They sleep, read, write and contemplate their own consciousness and rehearse their mind grammar, and contemplate paintings, gender, a Robert Duncan poem that relates to a mother as a falconress. They exist in a mysterious landscape of texture, unfathomable shapes, and extraordinary color. The tones of painters Bonnard, deKooning, Picasso, as well as Renaissance art, has inspired the color and shape of Grisaille.

Ed Bowes has been interested in torquing television’s soap opera, and has referenced literary texts in his many projects, including those by Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Virginia Wolff and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and Sophie Hawthorne’s letters in his many projects.

“What I’ve experienced in the work of Bowes, and in specific collaborations with him, is his insistence on the joyous qualities of vision (both internal and external) as one’s gaze interacts with, and ingests the phenomenal world — its beautiful shape and color, its parts of the body, its strange flesh and hair and clothing, and fragmented language. His movies are always rigorous exploration of persons, objects and their puzzling and magical positions in a complex and curious reality that also seems soothing because of his deep respect for humanity’s humor and mystery. I am reminded of William Blake’s admonition to “look to the little ones, the minute particulars.”

—Anne Waldman