George Landow (filmmaker)

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George Landow
Born
George Landow

1944
Experimental filmmaker

George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, photographer and

pen names
Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize.

According to the film historian Mark Webber, Land made some of his first films as a teenager and his later films, made mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, are some of the first examples of the "structural film" movement. Land's films usually involve word play and have been described by Webber as having humor and wit that separates his films from the "boring" world of avant-garde cinema.

His work is also known to parody the experimental and "structural film" movement, as featured in his 1975 film Wide Angle Saxon. His style of filmmaking is also inspired by Bertolt Brecht, educational films, advertising and television, and employs devices used by such in his films to destroy any sense of "reality", as exhibited in What's Wrong With this Picture 1 and Remedial Reading Comprehension.

Shortly after the release of his film On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud... (1977), Landow rearranged his name to Owen Land.[1] It is an anagram of "Landow N.E.".

The book Two Films By Owen Land (Lux, London) has the complete scripts of Landow/Land's films Wide Angle Saxon and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in

Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious
or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?, as well as footnotes written by Land interpreting the many references and elements of these two films and a filmography by Mark Webber. Released in May 2011, the book Dialogues - a film by Owen Land (Paraguay Press, Paris) has the complete script of his last film, as well as two interviews with the artist and essays written by Philippe Pirotte, Julia Strebelow and Chris Sharp.

Biography

Education, live theater and retrospectives

Land was born and raised in Connecticut, USA, and studied drawing, painting, sculpture, industrial design and architecture at

Whitney Museum of American Art. Until his death, Land was represented by Office Baroque
in Brussels, Belgium.

Death

Land was found dead in his Los Angeles apartment on June 8, 2011.[2] His death was announced by Office Baroque on July 13,[2] though the cause of death was not made public.[3]

Filmography

Year Title Format Length Notes
1961 Two Pieces for the Precarious Life
16mm
 10 minutes
1961 Faulty Pronoun Reference, Comparison and Punctuation of the Restrictive or Non-Restrictive Element
16mm
 5 minutes
1961 A Stringent Prediction at the Early Hermaphroditic Stage
16mm
 5 minutes
1962 Are Era 8mm 3 minutes
1963 Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club 8mm 2 minutes
1963 Fleming Faloon Screening 8mm 2 minutes
1963-4 Fleming Faloon
16mm
 7 minutes Color[4]
1964 Not a Case of Lateral Displacement 8mm 8 minutes
1965 Leopard Skin 8mm 4 minutes
1965 Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous? 8mm 3 minutes
1965 This Film will be Interrupted after 11 Minutes by a Commercial
16mm
 12 minutes
1966 Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
16mm
 3:30 minutes Color; silent[4]
1967 Bardo Follies
16mm
 20 minutes Color; silent[4]
1968 The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter
16mm
 9 minutes B/w[4]
1969 Baroque Slippages
16mm
 3 minutes
1969 Institutional Quality
16mm
 5 minutes Color[4]
1970 Remedial Reading Comprehension
16mm
 5 minutes Color[4]
1971 What’s Wrong With This Picture 1
16mm
 5 minutes B/w and color; silent[4]
1972 What’s Wrong With This Picture 2
16mm
 7 minutes B/w and color; silent[4]
1973 Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present
16mm
 6 minutes B/w and color[4]
1974 A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California
16mm
 12 minutes Color[4]
1975 No Sir, Orison!
16mm
 3 minutes Color[4]
1975 Wide Angle Saxon
16mm
 22 minutes Color[4]
1976 New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops
16mm
 10 minutes Color[4]
1978 Diploteratology
16mm
 7 minutes Color[4]
1977-9 On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed?
16mm
 18 minutes Color[4]
1983 Noli Me Tangere/Don't Touch Me Video 6:15 minutes
1984 The Box Theory Video 15:36 minutes
1999 Undesirables (Condensed Version)
16mm/Video
2009 Dialogues, or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind Video

Dialogues is informed by Land's study of folklore, myth and history, and the theology of all major religions, including Gnosticism and Kabbala. It ironically uses the form of the Platonic dialogue to explore the themes of reincarnation, art criticism and Tantra. It includes pastiches of badly-written well-known Hollywood films, as well as the films of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jim McBride and others. Dialogues was produced between January 2006 and August 2009 by Eric Michael Kochmer, Benjamin E. Pitts and Skye Le-fever.

References

  1. ^ David Ehrenstein (1984) Film: the front line, 1984, Arden Press, Inc., p49
  2. ^ a b Marcos Ortega (2011),"Owen Land (1944-2011)", Experimental Cinema, July 13, 2011. Accessed July 16, 2011.
  3. ^ Mike Everleth (2011) "Owen Land, R.I.P.", Underground Film Journal, July 14, 2011. Accessed July 16, 2011
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Reverence: The Films of Owen Land, Harvard Film Archive. Accessed June 19, 2011

External links

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