Owen Land

Birthday: 1944-01-01
Deathday: 2011-06-08
Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Gender: Male

George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, playwright, photographer, and experimental filmmaker. Shortly after the release of his film On the Marriage Broker Joke... (1977), Landow rearranged his name to Owen Land, an anagram of "Landow N.E." He has also worked under pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize.

According to film historian Mark Webber, Land made early 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. Land's films usually involve wordplay, and have been described by Webber as having a humor & wit that separates his films from the "boring" world of avant-garde cinema. Webber also said that he was inspired by Joyce, Beckett, and Ionesco. While the humorous aspects of his films makes them appealing to audiences who are not familiar with the perceived hermetic and insular world of avant-garde film, many of his works function as sharp parody of the experimental & "structural film" movement. The book Two Films By Owen Land (Lux, London) 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. Released in May 2011, the book "Dialogues - a film by Owen Land" (Paraguay Press, Paris) features the complete script of his last film, as well as two interviews with the artist.

Credits

Year Title
The Leopard Skin
2010-07-19 Fluxfilm Anthology 1962-1970
2009-02-16 Dialogues, or A Waist Is a Terrible Thing to Mind
1999-09-16 Excerpts from a Work in Progress (Undesirables)
1984-06-05 The Box Theory (Ireko Riron)
1983-05-24 Noli me tangere
1978-07-06 Diploteratology
1977-01-01 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?
1976-06-07 New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops
1975-01-01 Wide Angle Saxon
1975-01-01 No Sir, Orison!
1974-01-01 A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California
1973-01-01 Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present
1972-01-01 What's Wrong with This Picture? 2
1971-01-01 What's Wrong with This Picture? 1
1970-01-01 Remedial Reading Comprehension
1969-09-27 Institutional Quality
1969-01-01 Baroque Slippages
1968-05-30 The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter
1967-05-02 Bardo Follies
1966-11-11 Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.
1966-01-02 The Evil Faerie
1965-01-01 Studies and Sketches in 8mm
1965-01-01 This Film will be Interrupted after 11 Minutes by a Commercial
1965-01-01 Adjacent Yes, But Simultaneous?
1964-01-01 Not a Case of Lateral Displacement
1963-01-01 Fleming Faloon
1963-01-01 Fleming Faloon Screening
1963-01-01 Richard Kraft at the Playboy Club
1962-01-01 Are Era
1961-01-01 A Stringent Prediction at the Early Hermaphroditic Stage
1961-01-01 Faulty Pronoun Reference, Comparison and Punctuation of the Restrictive or Non-Restrictive Element
1961-01-01 Two Pieces for the Precarious Life