In the mid 1960s, Edward Owens (1949­-2009) was an African­-American teenager attending the Art Institute of Chicago when Gregory Markopoulos arrived to found the school’s film program. Owens, who was then studying painting and sculpture, had already been making 8mm movies for a few years; impressed by the maturity of his work, Markopoulos encouraged him to move to New York. Over the next four years, Owens created a cluster of films that display an increasing mastery of form, inspired by Markopoulos’s style but transformed into something purely his own.

Hypnotic and visceral, Sonic Cinema is a wild hypersensory experience. The films in this program explore the outer limits of perception, embodiment and cognition using experimental animation techniques, chemical interventions, powerful soundtracks, magnetic pulsations and beyond. Raw intensity and pure energy into the ontology of the moving image.

Anthology welcomes German filmmaker Ute Aurand for a special screening of her brand-new 16mm film RUSHING GREEN WITH HORSES, as well as OH! THE FOUR SEASONS, a 1988 film made in collaboration with Ulrike Pfeiffer (and, via an introductory text, Anthology’s founder Jonas Mekas).

Scottish poet filmmaker Margaret Tait (1918–1999) has long been one of the best-kept secrets of British cinema. In intimate films attuned to the secret life of things, people, and landscapes, Tait sought to reveal the other side of existence – the side we only notice when our own presence in the world comes to the foreground. An independent mind and eye, she focused on what she saw before her, be it the streets of Edinburgh, the crashing sea on Orkney or a pair of old boots in a barn, shedding an singular light on the manifold dimensions of things.