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Owen Land, formerly known as George Landow, was one of the most original and celebrated American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. The films he made during this period fused an i ntellectual sense of reason with the irreverent wit that distances them from the supposedly ‘boring' world of avant-garde cinema.
His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Having first explored the physical qualities of the celluloid strip itself in Film in Which There Appear… and Bardo Follies, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal' films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of word play and optical ambiguity.
His two most complex films are Wide Angle Saxon , in which a man has a spiritual revelation during an avant-garde screening at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and On the Marriage Broker Joke, whose disparate cast of characters include two pandas discussing, and making, an avant-garde film about the marketing of Japanese salted plums. Both are models of the unconscious process, with loose narratives that bring together a variety of elements through visual and verbal humour.
Land constructs ‘façades' of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising, or educational films, and by featuring characters that are often the antithesis of those we might expect to see, such as podgy middle-aged men and religious fanatics. He sometimes parodies experimental film itself, by mimicking his contemporaries and mocking the solemn approach of theorists and scholars .
Films such as Remedial Reading Comprehension propose an alternative logic for a medium that has become over-theorised and manipulated. Later works, beginning with Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present and A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour, draw upon the filmmaker's experiences with Christianity, but are far from evangelistic.
Land's films contain numerous cross-references to the art and culture of our time, giving them a relevance and vitality beyond the hermetic avant-garde. Owen Land has exposed the material of cinema and deconstructed its processes and effects, while covering the ‘big topics' of religion, psychoanalysis, commerce, and pandas making avant-garde movies. This comprehensive retrospective presents brand-new prints of the films and is accompanied by the book Two Films by Owen Land, which will be available at the festival screenings.
Mark Webber
Mark Webber is an independent curator of avant-garde and artists' film and video, and programme advisor to the London Film Festival. He has presented seasons and events at major international museums and festivals, and touring programmes such as “Shoot Shoot Shoot”, which showed at BIFF in 2002.
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