Owen Land

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 Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (Owen Land), and Yvonne Rainer.

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.

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 distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, "This is a film about you, not about its maker."

Feature-length compilation program presenting 37 out of 41 original fluxfilms produced and directed in the 1960s by Fluxus artists, including George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Robert Watts, Paul Sharits, et al.

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 development in the dramatic or musical sense" occurs. Fred Camper described Film in Which There Appear... as "a kind of Duchampian found object, a [...] film that focuses attention on the medium and the viewer." There also exists a 20-minute "widescreen version" involving two prints of the film projected side-by-side, with the left print flipped horizontally so that the "China girl" forms an almost complete face in the center.

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.” - Harvard Film Archive. Originally ran 45 minutes, then was edited down to 30, then 20 minutes. Final version was simply entitled "Diploteratology" and runs 7 minutes, and is the most commonly shown version.

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.

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 idea behind it is: Feminists claim that men objectify women’s bodies. So this was a revenge or a punishment for men who did that during their lifetimes, by being subjected to objectification by women in the after death state"

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.

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 the Flemish painters. - Harvard Film Archive

“Are Era was filmed off of television sets, of TV and news announcers, similar somewhat to Fleming Faloon.” (Owen Land, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2004)

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."

“They were more or less subjective camera films.The camera was my eye, involved in simple daily sorts of activities. One part was colour and one part was black and white.” (Lost?)

16mm film loop 'Film In Which There Appear...' is shown, then separate 16mm film of a cigar commericial, then back to first loop. “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– the beginning of genre and still life painting, common scenes, portraiture", said George Landow of the film in a 1967 letter to fellow filmmaker Sheldon Renan. “After 11 minutes the projector was turned off, re-threaded and the commercial– a found object– was put on.”

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 Wholed?'

“The soundtrack was Baroque harpsichord music composed by Georg Böhm.It was shown privately, and at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque on Wooster Street.The film was made, but never put into distribution.” (Owen Land, letter to Mark Webber, 2004)

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 distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, "This is a film about you, not about its maker."

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 which didn’t have titles on them. Then he put them together into his Fluxus reel and tried to remember who made them. It was an intentional Fluxus joke." (Owen Land, interview with Mark Webber, 2004)

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 generates a vertiginous and hypnotic mise-en-abyme centered on the female body. This moving mantra raises the figure of the girl to the status of medieval icon – Our Lady of the O – a fertility goddess from the prodigious and polysemic land Of Land.

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 displayed alongside the real world?"

1963-65, colour, silent, 17 minutes 8mm original transferred to 16mm 16mm blow up made by Anthology Film Archives in 2001. Contains the films Are Era, Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club, Fleming Faloon Screening, Not a Case of Lateral Displacement and Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous?

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

“That was a film about a person who had a mystical religious experience. The idea entitled is the early stage of foetal development, the point when the foetus can become either male or female, so it’s a hermaphroditic stage. Somehow that had something to do with this person making a choice, a decision. Could go both ways, in a spiritual sense. I lost the film, and I expect it was rather ambiguous anyway. It was more or less an excuse to make some visuals and had images of church architecture, religious statues and things. I think it was influenced throughout by Gregory Markopoulos’ films.” (George Landow, interviewed by Tony Reveaux, 1977)

A found, utilitarian object, the overtly moralizing educational film “How to be a Good Citizen,” is elevated to the status of ‘art’. First presented unaltered and then in Landow’s color facsimile, the film is further modified by applying an opaque matte that creates a spatial paradox. - Harvard Film Archive

“Both sides are the same time (well,almost). It’s really simultaneous – practically. Except at the end a car burns and that is the same car we have been looking at on the other track,already a burnt out wreck around which kids dance.All this was taking place in and outside of my window when I lived uptown.” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967) “Two random street events in New York City … in one of them a car was on fire.They’re shown in split screen, created by matte-ing.” (Owen Land, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2004)

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 at the International Auto Show, New York. - Harvard Film Archive