George Landow (filmmaker)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, photographer and experimental filmmaker. He also worked under the pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize.
According to the 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 and wit that separates his films from the "boring" world of avant-garde cinema.
His work is also known to parody the experimental and "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 was the model for Robert Heinlein's character Jubal Harshaw, unbeknownst to Heinlein.
The book Two Films By Owen Land (Lux, London) has 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) has 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.
