The Brooklyn Rail

Ed Bowes was born in 1944, and grew up in Riverdale, New York. In the early years of his film work, Bowes often worked collaboratively with his brother Tom Bowes, as well as artists Vito Acconci, Richard Foreman, and others; he shot Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie The Set-Up (1978) and played a major role in making Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983). His collaborations with poets, starting with Bernadette Mayer, are tantamount to his way of working and continues.

The Video Work of Ed Bowes: Language and Light, a retrospective of his films on video from Romance (1976) to the world premiere of A Punch in the Gut of a Star (2024), played at Anthology Film Archives in December 2024, co-curated by Alystyre Julian and Anne Waldman, programmed by Jed Rapfogel. Bowes is working on his video cine-archive, a unique collection of scripts, films, and collaborations. Many of his movies can be watched here: edbowes.com

Alystyre Julian (Rail): I experience your recent films as works of attention. You’re re-routing our proprioception…

Ed Bowes: Flying…

Rail: What connects them all?

Bowes: Everything about what I have, the sound, the things going around—it may not have a start, middle, end—I’m trying to make beautiful things, that’s all. I’m not trying to make a story. I’m in it to have something in my body that’s in the pictures. That way it feels—what I really want is for everyone to hold a pillow at their chest while they watch the film. I want to give them a pillow to feel better.

Rail: Tell me about your earliest filmmaking ventures.

Bowes: I didn’t start making work with pictures. My first real work was in radio. The first time I wrote for radio was in my first year of college, a contest for a radio program. I won! [Laughs]

Rail: Why movies?

Bowes: I don’t know why. I like them a lot. I love movies. I went to the movies all the time, I talked about movies, I wrote about movies, and then I came to New York.

At the New School, I took a film class—just one—that’s how I got into it. Bernadette Mayer and I were at the New School at the same time. She for poetry, and me for how to make a movie.

At the New School I found out that I could maybe actually make movies. That’s what I was there for, was to learn how to make moving pictures. The person running it asked me if I wanted to work with him, and he had a studio. I started working with him and that’s how I started learning something about making pictures.

Rail: What was your first project that you either worked on or made in video or film?

Bowes: I was lucky because my teacher, Arnold Eagle, a wonderful man, had a friend who was connected with a movie about football players and they needed somebody. Eagle said to them, “Oh, Ed can do it.” [Laughs] And I went to work on Paper Lion (1968) by George Plimpton. I got to do many different things on it. I just was lucky and I worked hard. They liked what I did, and I was getting a lot of money for that time. For three to four years, I could get work. I was also shooting things for people; I did a lot of shooting, and that was fun. So that’s how I started.

Rail: Let’s talk about Romance (1976).

Bowes: Romance was the first movie I made. I called it Romance because in French, “romance” [roman] means novel, or to tell a story. But I don’t really care about story. [Laughs] I think that’s one of the reasons why I called it that.

Anne Waldman: It was first shown on televisions at The Kitchen. You couldn’t watch video on a movie screen. It’s black-and-white video, correct?

Bowes: Yes.

Waldman: I don’t know anything about the whole origin of Romance. How did you write it? What was the inspiration?

Bowes: What happened was that I was pretty much ready to go, but I didn’t want to shoot it myself because I wanted to be making it. My brother had a picture that he had made, and it was really nice. And I thought, “This guy can actually shoot.” So I gave him some ways to shoot. So he actually shot it, and it was wonderful because unlike in film, I could look at the final thing. While it was being shot, I was looking at it through a monitor. I could bring the shot a little up, a little down. I could move it this way or that way.

So I shot this three hour movie that way, being able to look at it, and say to an actor (who was probably not a real actor) to do this and do that, and I didn’t have to wonder, and I didn’t have to worry about how much it was costing. It wasn’t costing me anything. It was just tape, and I could try and do this and do that. I’ve never made a movie of my own on film. They were all the way I did that first one. I didn’t have enough money for film, and I didn’t have the “video is terrible and film is good” problem. It’s stupid. I believe that I was the first person who ever did a feature film on video. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.

It was funny because at that time The Kitchen was giving me space to show stuff. MoMA was showing it. A bunch of places were showing it then. And I would get people who were saying, “But it’s not film.” God, give me a break. People thought that if you didn’t have film, then it couldn’t really be good. And that was ridiculous. I would be at MoMA, and people would be asking me a question or something, and it was like, “video is horrible”—god, but it wasn’t horrible. It’s not going anyplace. As we now know, every one of us has one in our hand. But that was very interesting. I had to go through that, but it was also fine because I didn’t have to spend the same money and I could make more things.

People thought of me as the person who shoots video like film. And that was absolutely true. That’s what I did. In Romance, I was worried about shooting the way that all of the places that I worked on were shooting, where you take this picture of this person and this picture of this person—all separate shots. And I didn’t think I could do that well enough. And I certainly didn’t think that my crew, who had never done anything on a movie except to go to one—I had to teach them how to do all those things. So I decided I would make every one of the shots a full scene. And in order to do that, I had to have a full day of rehearsals with actors who were not really actors. We would go to where we were going to shoot with my brother, and we would do it for five hours and try to get it right. I don’t think I’ve ever had better pictures—pictures I really care about. Every shot would be a full scene. I would just do the whole scene in one take. I would have to make fifteen takes to get the right one, but it was only one shot. Only one shot. And we would do that on the day before we did the real shooting and get it working. We would be at the same place we would be shooting it, and then we would come back the next day and we’d actually do it. And we would have the lights, we would have everything there. We learned how to do that quickly. It was strange in the sense that if you’re going to do it that way, when you go to edit this stuff, it’s really easy. I edited that movie in like three days. And because the only thing to do is to take the best ones and cut it, I could cut it in three days. I love cutting. The best is to cut.

Rail: It sounds like it has some magic, that month that you wrote Romance.

Bowes: No, I just had to hurry. [Laughs]

Rail: Did you handwrite it?

Bowes: No, I used to be able to type badly.

Waldman: Did people recognize it as being more like poetry?

Bowes: They felt it as poetry, but they didn’t think about it. It’s not me writing it, it’s them.

Waldman: And you’d been around Bernadette Mayer, Clark Coolidge, Vito Acconci—who started out as a poet—and others who had poetry imagination in their toolkits.

Rail: Were you adapting while you were filming?

Bowes: If I had a shot and it was going nowhere, and it was rehearsals, we’d go someplace else and do it. It also meant that you got a lot of time to walk and move. There was a lot of moving.

Waldman: I’ve seen you with scripts and so on, but then there’s always this spontaneous magic when you’re filming. There’s something that happens when you focus on a sleeve, and it becomes—you don’t even know what you’re looking at. So there is some balance or resonance between language, light, form, colors, and arrangement in films like The Value of Small Skeletons (2012) and Grisaille (2013). I know much of the avant-garde work through Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Harry Smith, Nathaniel Dorsky, and Jerome Hiler, but then you’re making these non-narrative language vocal films in a different way—from wanting scripts, rehearsals, and even auditions, to being meticulous and disciplined about the language of poetry as a kind of cinematic tentacle. And also at times there’s a little music, there’s definitely a soundtrack component and people speaking.

Bowes: Right, but that changes all the time.

Waldman: I wanted to ask about the literary sources for your original work. The language, the ideas, the soundtrack, the human body, the voices—how all these things seem to come out of an arena that you create when you’re going to make something. Then there’s always that magic of the moment I’ve seen you turn to Virginia Woolf, and Punch in the Gut of a Star opens with Gertrude Stein.

Bowes: The movies come out not so much as a way to tell a story. The movies mostly have scripts to them. And I write the scripts, and sometimes I get scripts from other places: things that I’ve been reading, things that I’ve always wanted to talk about or do or see. And so I would start by writing with that. Sometimes I’ll have a lot of things on my desk—texts and other pictures. Pictures are probably even more important to me than written text, although I love language and I work with it a lot.

Rail: Is the choice of images precisely worked out before you begin filming?

Bowes: No, they change.

Rail: How do you prepare for the actual filming of a script?

Bowes: The script is a script like any other. It’s in script form. I am more interested in how it flies than how it tells us what we’re supposed to know. And maybe you’ll never know what you’re supposed to know. That came from the language of poetry, but I also really like regular books. I read a lot.

How do I start actually writing a script? I know I have enough to make a new movie with, and so I can look at a lot of things—not necessarily a lot of movies, but a lot of things—a lot of books, a lot of pictures.

I just start to write, and maybe the first thing will be something somebody had written before me—two or three words perhaps—but I’ll start there and I’ll keep writing. I want the first thing to be something that people want to look at and listen to and be moved by, moved out of their seat. That’s the way I start. And there’s probably a person in it, but it doesn’t have to be a person—I like things just as much as people. I also don’t make stories in the way most people do. My stories are: Here’s something, here’s something. Here’s another thing. It’s like the other one—did you just notice that? The way it goes from thing to thing to thing, the way that person moves. What would look really good right after someone does that?

That sounds like there’s no story. There is a story. It’s just a story that doesn’t act like a movie or a piece of television. It’s something that I think would be interesting to see.

Then there’s the big question: when do I cut and when do I just leave it there? When do I change the color? In post, one of those things that you can’t get away from is you have something up there that’s making no noise and it’s showing you something. How long do you want to hold on, and why do you want to go to another place?

The most important thing for me in post is that every time one thing cuts to another, something happens to the person who saw it. They are in their head; their head is looking at something different there. And that doesn’t mean anything necessarily, but there was movement there. And it might be somebody feeling something: something moves this or that way. So that’s incredibly important. There are lots of people who do it in different ways, but I think a lot in post about, “Will people feel this? I don’t want them to feel this here.” And post is so great in that it changes everything. It absolutely changes everything.

Rail: I want to talk more about The Kitchen. Romance showed at The Kitchen, right?

Bowes: Yes. The Kitchen was always nice to me. And actually Tom got to be the videoperson, and he would choose the video programming. [Editor’s Note: Tom Bowes died in 2024. His film Two Moon July, shot by Ed Bowes, was honored in a tribute at The Kitchen in January 2025.]

Rail: The brothers Bowes.

Waldman: Yes, the brothers Bowes. They were a team.

Bowes: Tom was on TV all over America. Tom did this work—he made this movie. And the movie was called Two Moon July. The Kitchen asked him to do it, and they got two thousand dollars just to do this thing. Tom was the director of the whole show, which aired on PBS all over the country. It’s a good show. And all those people—he was the one who decided who was going to do it. And the two of us shot it. They kept telling us, “It’s too dark.” [Laughs] And it’s like, “It’s not dark.”

Waldman: It’s such a generative place. There was so much going on. Laurie Anderson was doing her thing, Philip Glass. It’s such a range of interesting people becoming artists together.

Bowes: Tom also did a movie for Bill T. Jones—a wonderful piece. Tom and Bill were friends. I shot Bill dancing once. There were just a couple of people who started doing what The Kitchen became. They were the first and only people who were doing anything with video.

I was very lucky because I got to work in movies in New York. I wanted to learn these things and get paid for it. There were very few movies being made in New York, because there were no real craftspeople. They knew how to do TV a little bit, but nobody was doing movies.

Waldman: Art movies.

Bowes: Yeah, right, nobody was making art movies—not any place, not just New York. It was only just starting to happen a little bit.

I was always into something that was more like movies than like art. However, all the people I knew, most of them were poets. Poets love movies, and they’ll take any kind of movie. But I also fell into things about movies that only poets can know about and could work with, and the language and the way things work was more poetic for me.

That was the stuff that was really interesting, not making-believe you’re talking to somebody across the room. Most of my friends were poets. Not all of them, but most of them. So, I could do anything. I didn’t have to do movies like everybody else was making movies.

In the one I just did, A Punch in the Gut of a Star, Anne wrote a very long piece with Catalan American poet Emma Gomis that floats all around it, and it included other things she was writing at the COVID time.

Rail: Akilah Oliver: 3 Readings (2011) is one of the most beautiful portraits of a poet I’ve ever seen.

Bowes: I knew Akilah for a long time, and we always talked about doing something together. We decided that we would just shoot Akilah. We got a couple of people in so we could light it and things like that. But it’s just her singing. She’s amazing. We made it very simple and just put the camera in front of her, held it, and saw what my hands did because of what she was doing. And that’s how I made that one. I’ll tell you another good story.

Rail: Yeah, let’s hear it.

Bowes: When I was born, it was the year of the first television. And I can remember seeing this first television, which was only about this big. I just wanted to see more and hear more. I would do anything to stay home and watch television. There were only, like, two channels, and you needed a different kind of television for NBC and one for CBS.

Rail: What were you watching? Soap operas?

Bowes: Not only did I watch them, I liked being moved by them, by their movements.

So one of those days when I stayed home from school and my mother let me lie on the couch and watch those movements, I realized that day that I could write those things. I was probably in third grade, but I knew I could write those things. [Laughs] I loved to watch television.

Rail: After Romance came Better, Stronger (1978).

Waldman: Let’s go to that.

Bowes: It was time to make a movie. And so I wrote Better, Stronger, and I sort of wrote it for Karen Achenbach.

Waldman: Karen Achenbach…

Bowes: “BETTER, STRONGER!” She says that in the beginning, “Better! Stronger!” Karen was in a band that was said to be the worst band in New York. [Laughs] It was good.

It’s sort of a comedy too, I think. They’re all comedies. Karen Achenbach is wonderful. She’s the poet in Romance. She had the biggest part in it. And then she had the biggest part in the second movie, which was hers, Better, Stronger—which was also her name for it.

Waldman: Did she think of herself as a poet or a performer or an actor?

Bowes: All of those things.

Waldman: Better, Stronger was on TV and got a lot of attention.

Bowes: It played on a Sunday night at nine o’clock when it showed on TV. Give me a break—how could I ask for more?

Waldman: Better, Stronger was televised on WNET’s The TV lab in 1979.

Bowes: It was going on television—what could be better? And then the next day I wanted to find out how many people watched it on WNET, and they can tell you that. The only people who didn’t like it were the people on WNET, because it wasn’t art. [Laughs] That’s really true.

Rail: What are your impressions of Better, Stronger at this moment?

Bowes: It was just another movie. Everything I wanted to say, I put into it. It was shot here at my loft in Chelsea. There was a dinner party. Charles Ruas was in it. The dinner was—it’s just people not knowing what to do.

Rail: Do you remember your experience of directing that scene?

Bowes: They all knew what they had to say. Nobody was moving and they were talking to each other. It was mostly Karen. What comes after that [in the archive list]?

Rail: How to Fly (1980).

Bowes: And then after that?

Rail: And then after that is Spitting Glass (1990).

Bowes: Spitting Glass, that’s Rosie Hall. And she’s a fast talking woman. She’s good. [Laughs] It’s like all of my movies: there are people who just get it wrong. The people, the characters—they just can’t get things right.

Waldman: Spitting Glass is interesting because it has an amazing script. It’s about a teacher, an academic professor who specializes in French furniture. It’s very ambitious.

Bowes: It was something I wrote because I needed to write something. And it’s kind of funny sometimes. It’s very funny, actually, I hope. It’s just a group of people who had a lot of time on their hands, and maybe you would want to hang out with them.

Rail: I want to jump into Entanglement (2009) and to ask about your collaboration with Anne.

Bowes: Anne gave me the name for it. She was very interested in “entanglement,” and—

Waldman: Quantum physics. In quantum physics, things are happening simultaneously. The phenomena of interdependent particles can be in opposite corners of the world, and there’s a connection. Einstein refers to it as “spooky action from a distance.” I think what Ed got was this constellation—a cluster of people—essentially acting or presenting this kind of entwined dynamic. I contributed to the text a lot, and then you have Robert Creeley in there, William Carlos Williams, and Eileen Myles.

Bowes: When Eileen saw it, they saw it in Boulder and they said it was really great to watch because they knew what was coming next: their language. It comes from a poem of theirs.

Waldman: But the point is that they’re existing in simultaneity, in relative space-time, and they’re in different moods, or states of mind—and it’s real, it’s not real, it’s fantasy, it’s dream, and so on. They’re moving through space. There’s also this sense of moving through light. I always feel with Ed’s movies, you’re in a kind of alternative space of light. And that can be as important as the character or the figure you’re watching. And you’re seeing colors you’ve never seen.

Rail: I want to ask you about timelessness in your work.

Bowes: The thing is, for me, the content is not what they’re saying. I mean, it can be part of what they are saying. But it’s light and it’s the movement and it’s just language, whether the language is doing anything or not.

In post, the way most editors go in, there’s a script, and they’ll take it, try to get a good take of it, and put it in, and then they’ll go and put in the next thing. And then when they’ve done that all the way through, they go back and they start working with fine cutting, they start with color, with luminance—and that’s all my content. The content is all that stuff.

So when I’m cutting, I put the first thing in, and then I try to make it good. How bright it is, how this it is, how that it is, what it is—and then I go to the next piece, and sometimes there is something that comes next, or sometimes there is something that should be there. But once again, once it’s put in, you don’t go forward. You sit there until you find something that gets you something. And that’s not the way editors edit. But that’s the way I do it, because that’s as much content as anything that anybody says. Whatever they say, can you even believe them? But the light is real.

Rail: I think that does answer my question about how you compose the timelessness. And there’s an interesting feeling of weightlessness and groundedness—things are often close to the ground. But also there’s a sense of weightlessness with the light shifts and the slight movements.

Waldman: There’s that wonderful moment of poet Eleni Sikelianos walking through the field with the William Carlos Williams poem. I remember you filming with your assistant. You had to get it right.

Rail: Eleni’s character says, “My mind was taken.” And I thought, “This whole thing is a meditation. This whole film is a meditation.”

Bowes: It is. I just loved it when she said that. That doesn’t get you anyplace, it just makes you fly.

Rail: And it sounds true, however she meant it. And then she says, “My narratives are messy.”

Bowes: That’s right. “My narratives are messy.”

Waldman: That’s a very Ed Bowes line.

Bowes: It sure is. It’s what I want my life to be. I can’t tell you how hard it is to be sitting here with stuff that I can barely remember. Thinking I just want to make another movie. And I want to watch this movie. I would watch any of these movies.

It’s also true that most of what I do is just feeling. I mean, I have no idea what it is. I just want to feel something.

Rail: But how do you write that? In the first place?

Bowes: I write the first thing, and it’s rare that I know what I want the people in it to be doing. It’s like I sit down, and I say, “That would be good to look at.” And then I say the same thing to myself about the next thing. And some people like it and some people don’t. Some people want to have a happy ending—like, what are you talking about?

The thing that would make me happiest is if the person who is watching it—looking at it—wants to touch it. That’s what I really want. I want them to want to touch it.

Rail: It is that intimate.

Bowes: Especially when I’m cutting. I don’t have to say anything to myself, but what I want during the cutting is to want to touch it.

Rail: I was inspired by just flipping through these interviews with Agnès Varda [edited by T. Jefferson Kline, 2014], and this question: Is it important for you to make a film for an audience? I wondered if you would take that same question.

Bowes: I do make all of my stuff for people who will see it. Why else would I do it? I can think about things, but I can’t see them. Movies are really interesting. They’ve been around for a hundred years now, and they’ve changed and changed and changed. And it’s a time right now where the language is changing because of the way people are watching. What would you do if you didn’t have people watching and being moved by them?

That doesn’t mean “moved” like it’s a big thing—it could be a very small thing. You can just be looking at something. It’s kind of good for me to look at something and then get away from it when it’s not that interesting.

Rail: I wondered if you could say exactly what you meant by wanting someone to watch what’s happening on the screen and to feel that they could touch it.

Bowes: You answered the question in asking it. If there’s one thing I would like, it’s that I want people to watch things that I made and just want to go up and touch it and play with it. That’s what I want to do, is to go up and touch it. That would be good for me.

Rail: In a way, it’s almost like you’re saying you want people to meet it.

Bowes: If I had a brain, that’s what I would have said. I would have said: These two, they would meet [brings his fingers together] here, at that place where we’re touching it.

It’s so funny the way pictures are changing today, but pictures are more important to me than almost anything. Pictures are the thing that get me the most. The world lived without people talking and showing pictures for hundreds of thousands of years. And now we’ve got them. What does that mean?

Rail: You mean we can’t get away from them?

Bowes: Now, absolutely. You can’t get away from them. I mean, it’s funny, too, because when I’m out here in Boulder, I watch a lot of TV. In New York, I can just go to the movies. And I get here, and it’s just terrible, in everything that we’re watching—they’re selling things on TV.

That’s what commercials are, that’s what they do. But everything else is conflict. And I would think eighty percent of movies that are not on television have conflict. People wonder why. There’s a lot of it out there.

Rail: Well, in terms of conflict or not conflict, I have often thought of at least two of your films that I’ve watched more than once as being restorative.

Bowes: I wish. Which two? [Laughs]

Rail: Seahorse Powder Room (2018), Gold Hill (2015), Grisaille (2013). At least two out of those three. Seahorse Powder Room, a film that has two children, a foxhead, and a discourse on Judith Butler is unforgettable.

Bowes: The best thing anybody’s ever said to me was in a letter, where they said that they felt better after watching my film.

Rail: Do you remember what film?

Bowes: I don’t remember which one it was. But I’ve been thinking about something like that. “What is this supposed to be doing?” Feeling better doesn’t hurt anybody. And it doesn’t have to do anything else. Which is kind of great.