Owen Land
Two Films by Owen Land
Author(s) Mark Webber
Format paperback book
Year 2005
Language(s) English
Pages 131 pages
Description
I saw him when he was George Landow, the rising star of the avant-garde. He came to the Funnel to show his work and enthusiastically announced that he had written a poem featuring the word "funnel." He read it for several days and it was so sensible that no one understood a word. When his magnificent hallucinatory films were screened, the packed house sat slack-jawed, and when the lights came back on, no one said a word. He shot us a dark look, openly hostile, moved his folding chair within inches of the terrified spectators in the front row, and announced that he hadn't come all this way to be met with silence and was prepared to wait "as long as it took." The silence continued. One of my friends, also a film student, bravely raised a trembling fist and asked: "In the film about the car (Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present), what type of film stock did you use?" Landow replied sharply: "I didn't think people still asked those kinds of questions."
His work was labeled "structuralist" by P. Adams Sitney, a leading figure in avant-garde writing, an unfortunate term that would be better replaced by "conceptual," as in "conceptual art film." Another clumsy term. But while Landow's films (who later changed his name to Owen Land because he was determined to acquire land) were concerned with filmmaking itself, he was more preoccupied with the experience of Christian conversion, a moment he replayed, parodied, and obsessed over in all his films. In No Sir, Orison!, this moment occurs in a supermarket. In Wide Angle Saxon, it happens after falling asleep watching a boring marginal film—applause is enough to trigger it. His film A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour was commissioned by the Christian World Liberation Front. His witty and playful works are full of palindromes and wordplay, creating a singularly strange quest for transcendence as he insistently returns to the frame of cinema.
Two Films by Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) offers a detailed overview of Owen Land's work. It presents the illustrated scripts of the films Wide Angle Saxon (1975) and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde be Wholed? (1977-79), accompanied by footnotes that untangle their complex web of references. Going well beyond the two films mentioned in the title, this book also includes a new interview, an annotated filmography, and recent essays by the artist. This publication was made possible through the benevolent diligence of Mark Webber, someone who, like Land himself, cannot help but believe.