George Landow

George Landow alias Owen Land (* 1944 in New Haven , Connecticut , USA ; † June 8, 2011 in Los Angeles ) was an American avant-garde film director , experimental filmmaker , writer and photographer . He is considered a pioneer of structural film.

life and work

Owen Land grew up as George Landow in Connecticut . He studied drawing , painting , sculpture and industrial design at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League of New York and the New York Academy of Art. He also studied acting and improvisation at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago .

He also studied classical music and flamenco guitar, piano and composition; Indian vocal and instrumental music at the Khan Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael , California . He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago , Northwestern University , the San Francisco Art Institute, and the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena , California. George Landow changed his name to Owen Land in the early 1970s.

He was the founder of the Experimental Theater Workshop at the Art Institute of Chicago. Owen Land wrote and directed several musical theater pieces, with original songs and music, including " Mechanical Sensuality " and " Swimming with Wimmen ". Some of his first films from the 1960s and 1970s are among the first examples of what is known as "structural film", also known as minimalism in film.

Land's films thrive on puns and subtle humor. You often parody the experimental "structural film", for example in Wide Angle Saxon from 1975. His work is inspired by Bertolt Brecht , he borrows from educational films, and lets his work be influenced by advertising and television.

Owen Land was represented with several films at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Film Show: New American Cinema department .

Retrospectives of Owen Lands films have been shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland , the American Museum of Moving Image in New York, the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands , the Tate Gallery in London , the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Kunsthalle Bern shown.

Filmography

• 1961: 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
• 1962: Are Era
• 1963: Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club
• 1963-1964: Fleming Faloon
• 1963: Fleming Faloon Screening
• 1964: Not a Case of Lateral Displacement
• 1965: Leopard Skin
• 1965: Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous?
• 1965: This Film will be Interrupted after 11 Minutes by a Commercial
• 1965–1966: Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
• 1967: Bardo Follies
• 1968: The Film that Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter
• 1969: Baroque Slippages
• 1969: Institutional Quality
• 1970: Remedial Reading Comprehension
• 1971: What's Wrong With This Picture 1
• 1972: What's Wrong With This Picture 2
• 1973: Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present
• 1974: A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California
• 1975: No Sir, Orison!
• 1975: Wide Angle Saxon
• 1976: New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops
• 1978: Diploteratology
• 1977–1979: 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?
• 1983: Noli Me Tangere / Don't Touch Me (Video)
• 1984: The Box Theory (Video)
• 1999: Undesirables
• 2008–2009: Dialogues, or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind

Literature and Sources

• documenta 5th survey of reality - visual worlds today. Exhibition catalog. (as a file folder) Volume 1: (Material); Volume 2: (list of exhibits); Kassel 1972.
• documenta archive (ed.): Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive on documenta 1972. Hatje Cantz, Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121-X .
• Mark Webber: Two films by Owen Land. Lux, London 2005, ISBN 0-954856-91-0 .

Web links

• The Films of Owen Land
• Owen Land (George Landow) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Materials by and about George Landow in the documenta archive