'Owen Land, formerly known as George Landow, was a really really great filmmaker. His films are like no others. I first saw Landow's early standard-8mm films (which may be no longer extant -- is that right?) such as Are Era and Not a Case of Lateral Displacement at an open screening in New York in the summer of 1964 or 1965. Open screenings, even back then, tended to have many films that weren't so interesting. Landow's not only engaged me, but seemed both great, and unlike anything I had seen before. One seemed to be long takes of a wound. Are Era was shot off TV, very rapidly cut (in camera I assume), showing a TV head both right side up and upside down. Still in my teens, I had only recently discovered cinema, and had never heard of Landow before that screening. "Structural film" had not yet been so named, so the statement from the gallery that Land's "debut" was a "critique of structural film" is not right, as a "genre" that has not yet been named is not exactly ready for its "critique."
'It's true that Land was not the most sociably adept of people. But one would not expect that from his films. If you understand his films, you understand that communication in them is always paradoxical. His fascination with palindromes (and he and I exchanged a few ordinal palindromes at times) was only a bare surface indication of his films' profound inwardness, an inwardness that was not one of psychological interiority, as in Brakhage, but of irreconcilable paradox. Land was fascinated with cinema's artificiality, and his use of film imagery was profoundly hermetic; it always feels as if his film images are spiraling inward, collapsing in on themselves.
'He was not necessarily the friendliest instructor for young filmmakers interested in "self-expression." He wasn't very patient with long, self-indulgent, emotionally-laden "personal" films. I once saw him advise a student, correctly in my view, that the student did not have the distance needed to deal with the family footage he was trying to fashion into a film. But those who so easily make personal voiceover pieces today (in which a voiceover narrates autobiographical details on the sound track which the images illustrate) might have something to learn from really studying Landow's deeply hermetic art, an art I find true in some deep way to the truths of images either on film or seen with the eye: Do we really know what any image might mean, or how it might "feel"?
'There is much humor in Land's work, and one genuine belly-laugh for those who had had their fill of the academic use of Hollis Frampton's (admittedly wonderful) (nostalgia) to illustrate "structural" film: The film within Land's Wide Angle Saxon titled Regrettable Redding Condescension, credited to someone named "Al Rutcurts" (remember Land's love of palindromes), which was indeed a "critique" of "structural film."
'I wish "experimental" cinema had more true originals such as Land, filmmakers who find a new and original use for cinema, a new type of film grammar, which, of course, can also lead to a new type of thinking. In my view, the "project" of "experimental" film at its best has always been that of forging new types of consciousness, new was of conceiving of the world, new ways of being in the world.' -- Fred Camper
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Stills
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Further
Owen Land @ IMDb
'Owen Land (1944-2011)' @ LUX
The Films of Owen Land @ Harvard Film Archive
Owen Land @ Office Baroque Gallery
Book: Mark Webber 'Two Films by Owen Land'
Owen Land @ mubi
'Avant-gardist Owen Land Comes Out of the Shadows'
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Documentary
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Interview 2009
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Obituary
'A question that one should never ask an experimental film-maker is: "What is your film about?" George Landow, who has died unexpectedly aged 67, would probably have responded: "It's about eight minutes." Along with many other "structural" American film directors in the 1960s and 1970s, Landow – who changed his name to the semi-anagram Owen Land in 1977 – rejected linear narrative, giving primacy to the shape and essence of film. "I didn't want to make films that were narrative. I found the whole traditional narrative approach was really non-visual," he commented.
'Landow trained to be a painter. This is demonstrated in the self-explanatory title of Landow's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1966). What he called "the dirtiest film ever made" consists of four identical images of a blinking woman, off-centre, made to appear as a loop without a beginning and end, giving prominence to the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the 16mm film, components that audiences do not normally see. Landow used "found footage", in this case a Kodak colour test, throughout his oeuvre, where film itself is the subject matter.
'Landow later parodied his early experimental films and those of his mentors, Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, with jokey titles such as 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? (1977–79). This features two actors dressed as pandas who discuss film in a false-perspective room patterned with checks and polka dots. "What is a 'structural film'?" asks one. "That's easy, everybody knows what a structural film is," comes the reply. "It's when engineers design an aeroplane, or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will soon fall apart. The film shows where all the stresses are." The pandas then suggest strategies for marketing Japanese salted plums illustrated by a Japanese publicity film created to look like found footage.
'Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970), in the form of an educational film that is part of a woman's dreams, uses colour footage of an auditorium of people who are about to watch a film, a mock television commercial about rice, text from a speed-reading manual, and the director himself running, with the superimposed words, "This is a film about you … not about its maker." In New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976), a middle-aged man attempts to carry out a test full of seemingly meaningless instructions before entering transcendence through a woman's shoe.
'Dialogues, his valedictory film, was based on his own bizarre and comic sexual encounters with women and his relationship with his contemporaries, including a mocking portrait of Maya Deren, the avant-garde film-maker. He was given a retrospective at the Rotterdam film festival in 2005. This programme then moved to the Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 2009, his work was presented at the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Kunst-Werke, Berlin.
'This was the last film Landow made before becoming Owen Land and leaving the underground film scene for more than three decades. He reappeared with his last film, Dialogues (2009). Little is known of his movements in between. He spent a year in Japan and taught film at US universities throughout the 1970s, and settled in Los Angeles in 2006. Landow died as mysteriously as he had lived. His death was announced a month after his body was found in his Los Angeles apartment.' -- Ronald Bergan, The Guardian
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3 films
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Film In Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1965-66)
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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
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New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976)
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p.s. Hey. As you can tell by the brevity of the p.s., I am in fact either at Parc Asterix or in transit to or fro, depending on when you see this. I'll be back in the form of a full-fledged p.s. tomorrow. In the meantime, why not investigate some works and so on by/about the late and very unique experimental filmmaker Owen Land. See you soon.