George Landow (filmmaker)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

George Landow (aka Owen Land) is a multi-media artist and filmmaker.

He made some of his first films as a teenager, and his later films, made mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, are some of the first examples of the structural film movement. Landow/Land's films usually revolve around word play, and have been described by critics as having humor & wit that separates his films from the "boring" world of avant-garde cinema.

His work is also known to parody the whole experimental & "structural film" movement itself, as featured in his 1975 film Wide Angle Saxon. His style of filmmaking is also inspired by educational films, advertising, and television, and employs devices used by such in his films to convey a sense of "reality", as exhibited in What's Wrong With this Picture 1 and Remedial Reading Comprehension.

George Landow changed his name to Owen Land sometime around 1980.

Two Films By Owen Land, which (as its title suggests) features the complete scripts of Landow/Land's films Wide Angle Saxon and 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?, as well as footnotes written by Land interpreting the many references and elements of these two films and a filmography by Mark Webber.

[edit] Education, Live Theater and Retrospectives

Born and raised in Connecticut, USA. Formal studies in drawing, painting, sculpture, and industrial design at Pratt Institute, Art Student’s League of New York, and New York Academy of Art. MFA in painting from NYAA. Studied acting and acting improvisation at Goodman Drama School and Second City, Chicago. Music studies include classical and Flamenco guitar; classical piano and composition; Indian vocal and instrumental music at the Ali Akbar Kahn College of Music in San Rafael, California; taught at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, San Diego Art Institute, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena California. Founded the Experimental Theater Workshop at The Art Institute of Chicago, and wrote and directed several musical theater pieces, with original songs and music, including “Mechanical Sensuality” and “Schwimmen mit Wimmen.” Retrospectives of Owen Land’s films have been held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, The American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, The Tate Gallery in London, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

[edit] Filmography

Two Pieces for the Precarious Life (1961)
Faulty Pronoun Reference, Comparison and Punctuation of the Restrictive or Non-Restrictive Element (1961)
A Stringent Prediction at the Early Hermaphroditic Stage (1961)
Are Era (1962)
Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club (1963)
Fleming Faloon (1963-64)
Fleming Faloon Screening (1963)
Not a Case of Lateral Displacement (1964)
The Skin (1965)
Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous? (1965)
This Film will be Interrupted after 11 Minutes by a Commercial (1965)
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1965-66)
Bardo Follies (1967)
The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968)
Institutional Quality (1969)
Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
What’s Wrong With This Picture 1 (1971)
What’s Wrong With This Picture 2 (1972)
Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)
A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California (1974)
No Sir, Orison! (1975)
Wide Angle Saxon (1975)
New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976)
Diploteratology (1978)
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)
Noli Me Tangere (1984 video)
The Box Theory (1984 video)
Undesireables (1999)
"Dialogues" (2006) in progress