Movies: Owen Land

Film in Which There Appear... is a six-minute loop of the double-printed image of a "China girl" or "Shirley card", her image off-center, making visible the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the film. According to Land, within the loop, "no develo...

Two artists create grotesque characters; Two-dimensional drawings which somehow have a life of their own, that exist in the same space as real objects. The film seems to ask, "Isn't every filmmaking venture a series of repeated, once-negative images ...

Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to ...

“Freud established that jokes were structurally akin to dreams in their use of condensation, displacement, representation by opposites, punning and ‘nonsense’. All of these strategies are much in evidence in (Land’s) marvelously duplicitous ON THE MA...

Dialogues is Land's last film: A chaotic, self-reflexive experimental narrative about many, many things-- namely Land himself. A caustic, anything-goes attitude permeates the late work....

The Land Camera Collective presents a (nearly) shot-by-shot remake of the Owen Land 1977 classic experimental film '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 Who...

Constructed around a found soundtrack in which a strict female voice delivers a test of perception and comprehension, Institutional Quality’s sound and image relationship become detached as the filmmakerloses interest in his subject....

A rapturous audio-visual mix that “deliberately seeks a hidden order in randomness.” The film combines the face of a woman in ecstatic, contemplative prayer with shots of an animal rights activist, and a scantily clad model advertising Russian cars a...

A reworking of an earlier film, Institutional Quality, in which the same test was given. In the earlier film, the person taking the test was not seen, and the film viewer in effect became the test taker. The newer version concerns itself with the eff...

A radical Christian group's lecture tour of US colleges was filmed in the cinema verité tradition, with hand held camera, sync and wild sound. To avoid making a conventional documentary, the filmmaker created a dynamic collage by stroboscopically edi...

Grand Opera marks a stock-taking of Benning's work and his life, presenting a personal and artistic autobiography woven together with a series of events dealing with the historical development of the number pi, Benning's travels, and homages to Micha...

Following a series of title cards, a man in sunglasses briefly flutters his hands like fairy. Owen Land states that this film was not made by George Landow, and believes it should be credited to John Cavanaugh. “George Maciunas had a number of films ...

An interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion experience whilst watching an experimental film. - Harvard Film Archive...

A shot of a Southern Belle waving to a group of tourists on a pleasure boat ride is looped, multiplied and then melted, creating psychedelic abstract images. “A paraphrasing of certain sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in motion picture terms....

“I made several films while still in high school, one of which was called Faulty Pronoun Reference, Comparison and Punctuation of the Participle Phrase* (or something like that) and was about grammar. More specifically, it compared three commonly ma...

In The Box Theory, Owen Land, the uncanny American structuralist, king of the absurd and a religious addict, recreates the image of the Indian girl, holding the butter box with the image of herself, to produce an ad-eternal video zoom. This operation...

A short documentary about notorious filmmaker Owen Land (aka George Landow) and his most recent film Dialogues (2009). Interviews with cast and crew, plus never-before-seen footage from the movie....

In his first 16mm film, Landow proposes that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then assign reality to anything at will. A cinematic equivalent of the illusionistic portraiture of ...

16mm film loop plus separate 16mm film reel. “You could mention that the ‘cigar commercial’ was for Dutch Masters – surely this was significant – its use in painting (Rivers, Deem), historical associations, Holland and Flanders in the history of art...

A revision of Bardo Follies, Diploteratology suggests that “death (destruction of the original image) is not an end but merely the next stage.” Preceded by longer versions entitled "Bardo Follies."...