{"id":4655,"title":"Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/television-fictions-interview-ed-bowes","version":"b7b66229aee44efd74e91b4c802314e4a18fe6ca408aaf2cb060f692b996024f","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:00.9244507+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Marita Sturken"}],"authorKeys":["Sturken, Marita"],"subjects":["Interviews"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Visual Studies Workshop","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"May 1986","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Rochester, New York","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"13","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"10","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0855","url":null},{"label":"Interviewee","value":"Ed Bowes","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/television-fictions-interview-ed-bowes.","publication":"Marita Sturken. Television Fictions: An Interview with Ed Bowes. Afterimage. vol. 13, no. 10. Visual Studies Workshop. May 1986.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/4655.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":44781},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":800}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"It is only recently that dramatic fiction and the context of television have become issues in video art. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, most artists chose to position themselves against the television establishment. However, in the current postmodern climate such distinctions between high and low culture, between mainstream and fringe art, are no longer viable. Today, many video artists make a point of defining their videotapes as \u0022works for television.\u0022 For these artists, the ideal audience is often a hypothetical one: they are creating innovative works designed to be shown on television, a system of dissemination still closed to them. While public television is sometimes a broadcast opportunity for these artists, they are interested in the audience that sits down to watch television on a regular basis, an audience that gains its perceptions of the world from the broadcast medium. Fictional structures have also been peripheral to most video art as well as to most experimental film. Perhaps the process of writing a script, directing actors, and setting up shots seemed to video artists too similar to the established ways of using a camera. However, over the past decade a group of artists has emerged that has chosen to explore fiction with its cameras in unconventional ways; among them are Matthew Geller, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and Ed Bowes. (I use the term \u0022fiction\u0022 here because the word \u0022narrative\u0022 has been used very loosely in video to mean just about anything in which something happens.) Of all these artists, Bowes was one of the first to think consistently in terms of creating works for television and making feature-length video stories. Bowes worked in and learned the craft of the film industry before starting to make tapes on his own, so his view of the relationship of television and video is necessarily different than that of many video artists. His perception of his relationship to the audience and his ability to manipulate them also stands in contrast to that of many artists, in large part because of the context in which he sees his audience. Bowes aims for the context of television, yet his tapes are narratives that would be startling and unusual television fare if shown on a commercial network. (Several of them have been shown on public television.) Bowes thinks of himself not as a video artist but as a dramatist, not unlike an author or playwright except for his chosen medium. He has made three tapes to date; each is quite different although they share a similar approach to language and fiction. The first tape is Romance (1976), a black and white drama that runs over two hours. The plot revolves around Tom (played by Bowes), his relationship to his girlfriend, Kathleen (Elizabeth Cannon), and what happens when her mother and her androgynous brother, Tommy (Karen Achenbach), come to visit. The central story, however, is one of sexual ambiguity, symbiotic relationships, and self-identity. Tom is receiving transcripts of his innermost thoughts in anonymous letters. His obsession with this has created tension between him and Kathleen, which increases when her disturbed brother disrupts their lives and forms a kind of uneasy triangle with them. Eventually, Tommy loses control and murders a friend of Tom. At this point, the characters decide to go on vacation and arrange by telephone to have the mess cleaned up. The last shot of the tape finds them by the sea, each wandering in his or her own world, as the camera roams the Formally, Romance (with camerawork by Tom Bowes) is a stunning piece of work, especially given the fact that it was shot on \u00BD inch equipment. It is structured in long, uncut takes, with the camera wandering through each scene in a complex choreography of movement. The real-time aesthetic of the work is also the result of the script, in which much of the action takes place in drifting conversations. On a formal as well as narrative level, the tape is in many ways circular rather than linear. Better, Stronger (1978) stands in contrast to the lilting pace of Romance. It begins with an intense monologue by its main character, Lana (played by Achenbach), which continues at a fairly relentless pace throughout. It is not a seductive story like Romance, but an aggressive one that often jabs and pokes at the audience. Lana\u0027s character is a high-energy, talkative actress who has returned to New York from California for a brief visit. She visits her family and cousins, who are a rowdy and obnoxious bunch, and storms from one scene to another. The tape ends, or refuses to resolve, in a scene where Lana disappears into a club and a producer looking for her tries unsuccessfully to follow. Bowes made Better, Stronger as an artist-in-residence at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen. The tape is distinguished by its preoccupation with and relentless poetic use of language. There are so many words in this tape that we hear and digest only a small percentage of the thoughts and ideas they convey. The tape also has a subtext concerned with the process of making television. It reveals the artifice of constructing television in several scenes-within-scenes of Lana acting her TV role on location. There is, in particular, a wonderful moment when we watch Achenbach\u0027s expressions and movements as she watches her own actions on an offscreen monitor while waiting for her cue on an audio dub. While Better, Stronger, like Romance, would seem to have a direct plot line, Bowes has structured the action loosely with no central crisis or resolution. 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 \u0022take a number, you\u0027ll need it later,\u0022 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, \u0022I\u0027ve been watching you. You\u0027ve got a clouded attitude. Here you are sitting on top of the foodchain\u0022; when the flying student loses power, his instructor coolly asks, \u0022you goin\u0027 down fast?\u0022; the father comes in on the quarrelling family and informs his daughter, \u0022You should be watching TV outside\u0022; and an enormous man complains about a photo in which the girl he is posing with \u0022is too small.\u0022 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\u0027s 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. Bowes is currently working on \u0022Oh, No. Paula!,\u0022 an eight-part series that involves the lives of a large family along with other characters in a sleepy seaside town over the course of a 24-hour period. The script embodies many aspects of these earlier works. It involves a real-time aesthetic of exploring everyday actions in which the action is often fragmented into scenes of simultaneous yet not necessarily related events. The primary feeling of the story is the dynamics and ambiance of a family, the way in which the siblings relate to one another and to their parents. The characters are all quite warm and sympathetic, and somewhat quirky. In addition to producing tapes, Bowes has also served as a spokesperson for media artists. He was a member of the media panel at the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) from 1982 to 1985 and the Board of Governors of the Artists\u0027 Fellowship Program at the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, CAPS, and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, and he teaches at the School of Visual Arts. Bowes lives in New York City. The following interview is an extensively revised and edited transcript from two interviews in November and December 1985. This interview was funded by a media writing grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. Marita Sturken: How long did you work in the film industry before making tapes of your own? Ed Bowes: Almost 10 years. My movie career was a little eccentric in that I treated it more like school than work. Treating movie work in a nonprofessional way provided a lot of opportunities to do things that most movie workers don\u0027t get to do; it allowed a lot of variations in the jobs I was doing, from assistant editor to associate producer to writer, among others. After about eight years, two things became apparent to me: I was learning less and less and what I was learning had mostly to do with aspects of the business that didn\u0027t interest me. I had just written two scripts on topics-supplied by a producer-that I hated. I couldn\u0027t have cared less about them actually being made. Making movies takes years and an enormous amount of effort, and the movies I was involved with, which were grade-B feature films and television docudramas, hardly seemed worth that effort. At the same time, I was writing scripts that I thought were worth the effort and that I knew would never be made because they were not on the surface saleable or commercial. I finally left the industry because I felt ready to make movies. The idea of making movies excited me, and it seemed easier to do it somewhere else. MS: Why did you choose to work in videotape? EB: It began as a convenience that soon became a clear choice. Romance was my first tape and the only one that wasn\u0027t written as a television show. I wrote it as a movie, and even while shooting it on tape I imagined it as a film. But tape was cheaper and alluring; and I was very flexible. This was also the first time that I\u0027d directed, and being able to see the final image on the spot gave me a kind of control that I wouldn\u0027t have in film. Romance was designed in very complex master shots; there\u0027s no cutting within scenes. Complex masters are tricky, and if they\u0027re not done well they can be very boring. There is a lot of choreography that has to be blocked between the camera and the actors. For complicated scenes, and Romance was almost all complicated, I did a lot of camera rehearsals on location, sometimes for days. Because my cameraman, Tom Bowes, and I could see exactly what was happening, we were able to try things out, take chances, and refine. We were able to do much more, especially in blocking and lighting, than we would do in film. In film one always has to hedge one\u0027s bets, because no matter how talented or experienced you are, it\u0027s impossible to know exactly what the image will look like until the film comes back from the lab the next day. Can you imagine a painter, choreographer, or writer having to wait 24 hours to see the results of a brush stroke or movement or word? Besides falling in love with that tremendous workability of the tape image, I also fell in love with the texture of the image. I still think tape is much more beautiful on a TV set than film. 16mm film looks just dreadful on TV; it\u0027s flat and grainy and indistinct. Also, I should add that around the time that I did Romance, I became more interested in TV than movies. MS: There are a lot of subconscious cultural associations that we have with seeing either tape or film. We associate a grainy film look with evidence and history or something serious, and a clean, studio-lit videotape image with mediocre TV. EB: These are cultural associations that are the result of our previous experiences in watching the two. ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":44781,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}