How to Fly

Written and directed by Ed Bowes with Tom Bowes and Karen Achenbach

30 minutes
1980

How To Fly (1980), a collaborative venture with Tom Bowes and Karen Achenbach, broke from the central narrative of the previous tapes to explore a completely nonlinear collage of unconnected scenes. It begins with several quick takes, as the narrator instructs the viewer to “take a number, you’ll need it later,” in a smoothly familiar tone. Disparate scenes follow: a novice learns to fly a plane with his instructor on the ground giving instructions via the radio; a young man has a lengthy conversation with a rat while sprawled on a city sidewalk; a girl does a flip in her classroom; a mother and daughter fight in their front yard about television; and two shady characters in an alleyway have an enigmatic and unresolved conversation, among others. There is a humor and cleverness to many of these scenes: the rat informs her captive audience, “I’ve been watching you. You’ve got a clouded attitude. Here you are sitting on top of the foodchain”; when the flying student loses power, his instructor coolly asks, “you goin’ down fast?”; the father comes in on the quarrelling family and informs his daughter, “You should be watching TV outside”; and an enormous man complains about a photo in which the girl he is posing with “is too small.” Ultimately, the tape feels like a quirky commentary on television in which the metaphor of learning to fly has to do with taking control (or trying to)-of one’s life, of all this information, of all of these images. Ultimately, How To Fly is not about how its disparate scenes relate but the way in which they slide by and inform one another. —Marita Sturken, from the interview ” Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes
,” May 1986, Afterimage, Vol. 13, No. 10

“For some point of view, Bowes’ movies could be seen as comedies of manners. There are extremely witty moments. For example, in How to Fly, a talking rat sits on the chest of a person at night in a doorway, scolding the person for feeling sorry for himself, how he is after all at the top of the food chain!” —Anne Waldman, Vanitasmagazine, Issue 5, 2010