The 16mm films of Owen Land shown chronologically over two days, with work by LA artists Deirdre O’Dwyer, Pat O’Neill, and Margo Victor. September 6 and 7, at Human Resources gallery in Los Angeles.

Screening:

Owen Land

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc, 1966

Diploteratology: Bardo Follies, 1967

The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter, 1968

Remedial Reading Comprehension, 1970

What’s Wrong With This Picture?, 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

On The Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation of the Unconscious, Or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed?, 1979

Deirdre O’Dwyer

The Rule of 3 (version 2), 2014

Pat O’Neill

Saugus Series, 1974

Margo Victor

Astronauts, 2014

Film curator Mark Webber on Owen Land: “Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) was one of the most original American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. His works fused an intellectual sense of reason with the irreverent wit that distances them from the supposedly ‘boring’ world of avant-garde film. His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Having explored the physical qualities of the celluloid strip, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal’ films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of elaborate wordplay and visual ambiguity.”

Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow) was one of the most original American filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s. His works fused an intellectual sense of reason with the irreverent wit that distances them from the supposedly ‘boring’ world of avant-garde film. His early materialist works anticipated Structural Film, the definition of which provoked his rejection of film theory and convention. Having explored the physical qualities of the celluloid strip, his attention turned to the spectator in a series of ‘literal’ films that question the illusionary nature of cinema through the use of elaborate wordplay and visual ambiguity. The characters in Land’s films are often the antithesis of those we might expect to see, such as podgy middle aged men and radical Christians. He sometimes parodies experimental film itself, by mimicking his contemporaries and mocking the solemn approach of its scholars. Land constructs ‘facades’ of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising or educational films, and proposes an alternative logic for a medium that has become over theorised and manipulated. He has exposed the material of film and deconstructed the process and the effect, while covering the ‘big topics’ of religion, psychoanalysis, commerce and pandas making avant-garde movies.