I’ve seen one short Owen Land film before and wasn’t so high on it, but I’m ever intrigued by the idea of a structural-experimental parody artist, or whatever he was, so I’m checking out everything I can find. All these were credited to George Landow – he changed his name soon afterwards.

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

Approx a one-second loop repeated a couple hundred times. Possibly one of those color reference images. Mekas was a fan. Why add film projector sound when any proper screening (not on a digital file in my living room) would have its own film projector sounds – is that part of the meta nature of the project or was it added during the video transfer?

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Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)

1. A few-second loop of a boat exiting a tunnel while a person (real? animatronic?) waves on the left side
2. Three porthole views of the same image distributed across a mostly black screen
3. The image begins to get replaced with the bubbly butterfly-wing textures of celluloid melting or dissolving
4. Replacing the porthole views, we get fullscreen strobing freezeframes of the melt-dissolve textures
5. Left/right split-screen of film melts in motion
Fully silent.

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Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)

“This is a film about you … not about its maker.” That’s more like it, layers upon layers. A woman dreams a classroom, a man jogs in place in front of a screen of someone jogging, an alarm sounds while we read about phony teaching techniques at a preordained pace, and why not throw in a commercial for pre-cooked rice.

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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)

An annoying one – high-contrast images of street scenes, closeups and a trade show, while overlapped sound loops are praising God/Jesus. Pretty short, at least.

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Wide Angle Saxon (1975)

Lively one with usually-sync sound, cutting between all sorts of things. Bible stories, and stories of modern people influenced by bible stories. Repeated outtakes of a reporter self-conscious that he can’t remember Panamanian generals’ names but who keeps pronouncing “junta” with a hard J. A terrified artist pouring red paint on things and people, who gets his own title sequence. “Oh it was a dream” – does this end with the woman from the beginning of Remedial waking up? Were the six years between films all her dream?

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New Improved Institutional Quality (1976)

Woman is giving exam instructions on the soundtrack, and the guy onscreen is following them. The instructions involve writing numbers on a photograph, so the guy goes inside the photograph, writing the numbers with a giant pencil. Then he shrinks further when confronted with a woman inside the picture, nestles in her shoe, and then flies silently through some previous Land films (Film In Which, Remedial). Weird, I would not have got the references if I hadn’t been watching these together.

new improved sprocket holes, edge lettering:

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On The Marriage Broker Joke (1979)

People in panda suits introduce versions of films about the marriage broker joke, which it sort of eventually gets around to telling. Marketing discussion with an offscreen speaker doing a bad Japanese stereotype accent. Ends with more religion stuff. The onscreen text was probably meant to be readable, but my video copy is horrendous. Rosenbaum called it an “obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist Christianity”

P. Adams Sitney in Artforum:

From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.

He had no scruples about mercilessly making fun of his fellow filmmakers (and of me) so long as he prominently mocked himself and his own works, as he did with wry humor in films such as New Improved Institutional Quality and On the Marriage Broker Joke. His religious convictions never dispelled his fascination with the absurdities of human behavior. The drives for possessions, certitude, beauty, sex, money, and food — especially sex — make Land’s fictive humans ridiculous, confused, and devious. His ability to invent and to people his films with memorably ridiculous characters was unmatched, even by the late George Kuchar, among American avant-garde filmmakers.

Land:

I… developed the technique of fabricating fantastic stories about myself and relating them in a perfectly deadpan manner so as to convince my hearers of their authenticity. This was not done maliciously, but out of a sense of the absurdity of all phenomena and the arbitrariness of all information. This may be a form of poetry, which in Greek means making—as in “making it up.” Usually it is called “lying.”