You Can Touch But Don’t Look: The Films of Maryam Tafakory and Edward Owens

Sun, Mar 24, 2024

Haunted silhouettes and veiled intimacies dance across the films of Maryam Tafakory and Edward Owens. Born and raised in Iran, contemporary artist and filmmaker Tafakory approaches images almost as tapestries—weaving together multi-textural alchemies of archival materials, poetic fragments and found footage to negotiate sight and touch. Owens, a queer Black avant-garde filmmaker, made exquisite abstract and embodied compositions in his brief career in the 1960s—exploring sculptural motion and melancholy desire. Incorporating a shared method of collages and fractures, Owens and Tafakory invite us to question where bodies begin and end, how absent narratives are threaded together and whether we see each other at all.



 


Tomorrow’s Promise (1967)
Dir. Edward Owens
42min; 16mm


Formally innovative and deeply personal, this chimeric avant-garde short from Edward Owens centers a dying romance between two people. Visions take the place of words in a discursive narrative composed of layered images, ecstatic edits, and striking nude portraits.


 

Autre Fois J’ai Aimé Une Femme (1966)
Dir. Edward Owens
24min; 16mm

A treatise on forbidden desire, Owens’ debut film features extravagantly innovative lighting, glossy magazine cut-outs, and classical paintings.

 

 

Nazarbazi (2022)
Dir. Maryam Tafakory
19min; DCP

Nazarbazi (the play of glances) is a film about love and desire in Iranian cinema where depictions of intimacy and touch between women and men are prohibited. 


The film focuses primarily on images of women whose bodies have been erased and victimised in post-revolution cinema and alludes to discrete forms of communication that operate within—yet also circumnavigates—the censors. It attempts to touch the spaces we cannot touch; inner feelings/sensations—but also untouchability beyond physical contact: unspoken prohibitions/regulators that may only be unveiled as embodied experiences. The film uses poetry and silence as the only language with which we can attempt to touch these spaces of socio-political ambiguities.

 

 

Mast-del (2023)
Dir. Maryam Tafakory
17min; DCP

Two women lie together in bed. As the wind bashes against the window, one recalls a past date to the cinema. The narrated scene cannot be conveyed through images. Layers of found and original footage are superimposed to fill in some of the cracks, the deletions, the limits of representation. A love song that would never pass through the censors, Mast-del is about forbidden bodies and desires inside and outside post-revolution Iranian cinema.

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