Owen Land

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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)

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)

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.

“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"

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."

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 effects of the test on the test taker. An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of the test — a test containing meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-follow directions by entering into the imagination. —Canyon Cinema

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 editing together pairs of scenes using a rapid rhythm of three-frame units.

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)

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

“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?)

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.

“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 MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE… [...] so clever and original a filmmaker as to make most others – not to mention his critics – seem flat-footed by comparison. ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE harks back to Bunuel’s early work. Not only is it structured like a dream and filled with sexual imagery, but like Un Chien Andalou, it smacks of being an insider’s joke played upon the avant-garde. Where Bunuel used the insights of psychoanalysis to satirize Christianity, Land– with an almost equal perversity – reverses the process and uses Christianity to send up Freud.” – J. Hoberman, American Film

“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)

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?

A rough-cut of selected scenes, edited as a sampler to be used in fundraising towards completion of the film "Undesirables". “The idea started with a casual comment made by Stan Brakhage, must have been way back in the early 1970s. It stuck in my mind. Now that I think about it, Brakhage may have meant this as a joke. He said, “Someday Hollywood will probably make a film about us,” ‘us’ meaning the experimental filmmakers “and I wonder which actors will play us?” Think about that first of all: the idea that Hollywood would make a film about experimental filmmakers is totally ridiculous. The fact that one would think about which actor was going to play me at some time in the future, I think that’s very funny. Eventually it germinated in my mind and I thought it was an interesting idea… A film about experimental filmmakers, especially in the very formative period, approximately 1968 to 1972.

As Landow and his students were testing a new video camera, an elderly man began to talk to them about new technology. This impromptu conversation forms the basis for a comparison of spoken and written language. - Harvard Film Archive

“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 made grammatical mistakes with three people who were making them.The soundtrack was a dirty poem (what else?) and I made my own concrète sound. * ... Punctuation of the Restrictive and Non-Restrictive Element (?)” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967) (Lost?)

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 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

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 sore – which is not static, but a series of exposures of a healing infection – is called Not a Case of Lateral Displacement. It is not a ‘medical illustration’ but an actual infection.” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967)

“There is a TV screen superimposed over his face, his face being the screen and the screen being the image.The image of a TV screen can be an image in a movie. On television, the movie is the television image.This seems logical.” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967) “A study for Fleming Faloon. Kraft is the actor in Fleming.” (Owen Land, letter to Mark Webber, 2004)

“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)

“The Skin was never, alas, screened publicly. What it is is a leopard skin which is filmed so that something optically happens as the spots flash on and off – the effect is similar to a film which was recently made much over called The Flicker. Actually, the correct title is The Leopard Skin (the Cinemateque notes were dictated via telephone to secretary). (Date: 1965? or 4.)” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967) “It was a fake leopard skin.” (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."

After singing a vivacious song of love in the aisle of a supermarket, the performer kneels down to ask forgiveness for those involved in the commercial food industry, which substitutes natural produce with non-nutritious commodities.

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.”

“Fleming Faloon Screening does not document filming of Fleming Faloon. It is only a screening, contrasting the movie images with the interior of the room.The people in the room are ‘once removed’ from us.The person in the movie is two (and three) times removed.” (George Landow, letter to Sheldon Renan, 1967) “There was a screening of Fleming Faloon, the 16mm version, in the FilmMakers’ Cooperative office, and I filmed, on 8mm, the screening on the screen in the office. It shows the whole room and the people in the room watching it.” (Owen Land, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2004)