Entanglement

A film by Ed Bowes

Co-written with Anne Waldman with poetry from Robert Creeley and Eileen Myles

Performances by Eleni Sikelianos, Oona Fraser, Michael Jones and Angie Yeowell.
With participation from Reed Bye and Akilah Oliver.

63 minutes
2009

Entanglement is a story about how we think,
what we want, the ways of our visual memory, about the patterns and phrases that float through our minds. Abigail, Rowena, Jun and Glance are the subjects and agents of the movie. Their entanglements with one another and with their worlds of image, ideas, sexual desire and retreat are its content. Entanglement is Ed Bowes’ tenth major film, his fourth in a series that focuses on the relationships between word and image. It is the second film he has written with poet Anne Waldman.

“Entanglement is a walk-in poem, and when you’re inside the only way out is to go further in. Finally you walk through Eleni Sikelianos’s pupil and then — but I don’t want to give anything away — well it has to do with the ambiguity of the human body, and beauty’s stillness. What’s quite remarkable to me is Ed Bowes ability to allow the actors (Oona Fraser, Eleni Sikelianos, Michael Jones and Angie Yeowell) to speak lines of poetry (by Bowes, Waldman, Myles, and others) as dialogue; a world where poetry is spoken is the world of Entanglement. Richness and intellect, simplicity and mystery, love and terrifying beauty abound.” — Bob Holman

“Entanglement (2009) observes an intimate group of people who are somewhat in love with one another and who may or may not be related. Much play on the words “step” and “half.” The script embeds the poetry of Robert Creeley (“for love I would put a candle in behind the eyes”) and Eileen Myles. Entwined logopoeic nuances of race and gender and genetics about and repetitive images of arms, legs, feet, hair, and odd angles of head and mouth mesmerize into a sea of erotics quivering under a surface of familial tension. A kiss is a lifetime of yearning. The blink of an eye of seductress Rowena (Oona Fraser) quickens the pulse as she queries her “sister”: Do events — phrases, sounds, short little sections, or practices, or series — sometimes run through your head repeatedly? And what do you do about them? Abigail (Eleni Sikelianos) answers: Sometimes I don’t notice. They do damage. In another scene, Rowena walks down a rural road after a brief romantic encounter: Too fucking polite to be a suitor!” —Anne Waldman, Vanitas magazine, Issue 5, 2010

“Digital technologies are supposed to distance us from our material surroundings, but in Ed Bowes’ hands, they accentuate the physical world. His exquisite new film, Entanglement, shot in high definition, lingers over skin pores, strands of hair, a clutch of flowers, a chair’s back. The accompanying script — written with poet Anne Waldman — is philosophical, abstract, while remaining as sensual as the camera’s vision. Together, image and word draw attention to the nuances of love, language, and touch that we frequently overlook in our bustling everyday lives.” —Alan Gilbert

“Basically what I saw happening was a radical interiorization of thought and language, swirling around desire. There is something theoretical (Lacan perhaps) about the connection between desire and language because both are un-articulatable: language is merely signification, desire is moving towards an object, wanting to touch, but not being able to. Like the impossibility of language to “touch” anything. To use language to articulate desire is a very complex strategy because desire really cannot be represented in language. But Ed Bowes’ fragments, along with the images, capture desire’s fleetingness, which I find quite remarkable.” —Kristin Prevallet