Owen Land

Biography

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…

Directed

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

Also appeared in

1. Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)
2. Grand Opera: An Historical Romance (1979) — Al Rutcurts
3. In the Land of Owen (2009)