Dialogues

George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, photographer, and experimental filmmaker. He has also worked under the pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize.

According to film historian Mark Webber, Land made some of his first 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 word play, and have been described by Webber as having humor & wit that separates his films from the “boring” world of avant-garde cinema.

His work is also known to parody the experimental & “structural film” movement, as featured in his 1975 film Wide Angle Saxon. His style of filmmaking is also inspired by Bertolt Brecht, educational films, advertising, and television, and employs devices used by such in his films to destroy any sense of “reality”, as exhibited in What’s Wrong With this Picture 1 and Remedial Reading Comprehension.

Shortly after the release of his film On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud… (1977), Landow rearranged his name to Owen Land. It is an anagram of “Landow N.E.” Land served as the model for Robert Heinlein’s character Jubal Harshaw, unbeknownst to Heinlein.

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 and essays written by Philippe Pirotte, Julia Strebelow and Chris Sharp.

Education, live theater and retrospectives

Land was born and raised in Connecticut, USA, and studied drawing, painting, sculpture, industrial design, and architecture at Pratt Institute, Art Student’s League of New York, and New York Academy of Art. He graduated with an MFA in painting from New York Academy of Art. He also studied acting and acting improvisation at Goodman Drama School and Second City, Chicago. His music studies include classical and Flamenco guitar; classical piano and music composition; Hindustani classical music at the Ali Akbar Kahn College of Music in San Rafael, California; He taught film production at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, San Francisco Art Institute, and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena California. He founded the Experimental Theater Workshop at The Art Institute of Chicago, and wrote and directed several musical theater pieces, with original songs and music, including “Mechanical Sensuality” and “Schwimmen mit Wimmen.” Retrospectives of Owen Land’s films have been held at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, The American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria New York, The Rotterdam International Film Festival in the Netherlands, The Tate Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Until his death, Land was represented by Office Baroque Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium.

Land was found dead in his Los Angeles apartment on June 8, 2011. His death was announced by the Office Baroque Gallery on July 13, though the cause of death was not made public. —Wikipedia