Project Description
Max Bowens
FSC-Harvard Fellow 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24
Max Bowens (b. 1993) is a filmmaker, editor, and visual studies scholar investigating the relationship between biometric technologies and the moving image.
His most recent film, Sanctuary, an experimental short about a nature reserve in rural Massachusetts, premiered at the Maryland Film Festival (Diverging Forms, 2020). Prior to directing, Bowens worked as an editor for Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life), C.W. Winter (The Works and Days) and Amiel Courtin-Wilson (Carnation).
His theoretical writing focuses on avant-garde ethnography, scientific visualizations, black geographies, and museum conservation, and has appeared in liquid blackness [forthcoming], Film-Philosophy, OAR: The Oxford Artistic and Practice Based Research Platform, Film Criticism, and a forthcoming monograph on cinema and materialism published by Éditions Mimésis.
FSC Works
Shot Reverse Shot (work-in-progress)
Max Bowens and Valerie Werder
Shot Reverse Shot is a feature-length hybrid documentary that weaves together police bodycam recordings with footage shot on location in Ogemaw County, Michigan, plunging viewers into the ambivalent experience of policing and being policed in small-town America.
Looking At You Looking At Me (2023)
Max Bowens
A network of audiovisual correspondences between mother and son through time, autism, and the screen. Recorded over a period of three years, Looking At You Looking At Me examines their attempts at connection by chronicling the cinematographic expanses of their world, and the limits of its representation.
Aurora (work-in-progress)
Max Bowens
Underneath the surface of the earth, as human beings are reorienting our energetic relations to the natural world, time both flows and ruptures. In Point of Rocks, Wyoming – the largest coal producing state in the U.S. – only one underground coal mine remains. Laborers at Bridger Coal work towards an unknown abyss, and away from one past.