Bob Cowan

Robert Cowan was born in Toronto in 1930. During his youth he attended a private boarding school (Upper Canada College-UCC) and later enrolled at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) as a painter. After graduation he spent a year studying in Paris and then returned to Toronto. An artist pal by the name of Bill Ronald had just moved to New York City and established himself at the Kootz Gallery, and he convinced Bob that as an artist that was where he should be. And so in the '50s Bob moved to New York. Fellow Canadian Mike Snow, who would become renowned for his experimental film Wavelength, and who had also attended UCC and OCA, joined him a year later with his wife, Joyce Wieland, who would also make films. The three of them lived and hung out together in the bohemian enclaves of Greenwich Village. The New York underground film scene, officially dubbed The New American Cinema, was only just taking shape. Bob studied painting with the German-born abstract painter Hans Hoffman (1880-1966). His early years in the City were devoted to that medium, but gradually he became more interested in film. Bill Ronald introduced him to Maya Deren, whose films he had seen in Toronto, but now he was able to attend some of her New York lectures and found them most inspiring. He saw as many movies as he could, among them Cocteau's Blood of a Poet and Hans Richter's Dreams Money Can Buy and later 8 X 8. In a small theater that he frequented in The Village he discovered the works of Stan Brakhage. Bob's own initial foray into motion-picture making was done with the aid of a cheap 8mm camera he'd liberated from a pawnshop, and most of the editing was done in camera. Bob CowanHe acted for various filmmakers, Bob Fleischner and Ken Jacobs among them. "I performed in Ken Jacob's The Sky Socialist," he recalled, "as a specific character type he needed." Their earliest films were cast with friends and neighbors who lived nearby, but eventually they found their very own "superstar," a well-endowed Brooklyn girl by the name of Donna Kerness who had graduated with them from high school. She attended dance classes taught by Alwin Nikolais, and Mike and George monitored a couple of sessions. Sins of the Fleshapoids Bob and Donna began acting together in their films, infusing works such as Born of the Wind with a new dramatic intensity. But perhaps Bob's most interesting performance was his dual role in The Craven Sluck, directed by Mike Kuchar in 1967. This film concerns itself with the sordid domestic routines of a typical Bronx married couple, Adel and her goofy salaryman husband, Brunswick, played by Bob. Adel (Floraine Connors) seeks escape in the arms of a secret lover, Morton (George). To complicate matters, Morton is married, to a rotund, pill-popping frump called Florence, played by Bob in a cheap wig. Color Me Shameless, from 1967, is really in almost every sense George's odd film out. The thirty-minute running time is unusually long for him at this point in his career, and the fact it was in b/w and the somber tone - a total rejection of the "camp" label that was being applied to his work - is also atypical. Unlike diarist films like Hold Me while I'm Naked, he himself never appears in it. Rather it is Bob who stars, playing the role of a lonely, dysfunctional artist that we can assume hits rather close to home. None of his film work provided Bob with much of a living, and he was compelled to toil as a projectionist and light man to pay the rent. He worked various stints here and there, but his main gig was at the Cinematheque, the screening space for the NY Filmmakers Co-op. Bob was not a member of the Warhol entourage but was something of a "fellow traveler" and appears in a Warhol "family portrait" taken at The Factory and published under the headline "The strange world of Andy Warhol," in the June 5th, 1968 edition of The Daily News. For many years Bob contributed a column on underground cinema to the mainstream Canadian film magazine Take One, and we hereby print the following (undated) piece with his permission, the story of how The Chelsea Girls came to be. Sins of the Fleshapoids Bob's collaborations with Mike and George continued well into the '70s (they both act in his film The Shadow Glass from 1978), and he also served on the board of directors at the New York Filmmakers Co-op and worked at the Millennium Film Workshop from 1984 to 1986. He returned to Toronto in the late '80s, after thirty-four years in the U.S. Following that, he served on the board of the Canadian Filmmakers Co-op, but due to the politics at play found it an unpleasant experience. On June 21, 2011 Bob Cowan passed away at his home in Toronto.