»The period that interests me the most is what came before the after: in other words, pre-post« This is how the filmmaker Owen Land once described his attitude to temporality and history. And it is precisely this paradigm that characterizes not only his oeuvre – some thirty films from the period between 1960 and 1980 – but also its gradual rediscovery. »The period before the after« undoubtedly describes the peculiarity of the filmic moment, which, as a free-floating, imaginary signifier, is already over at the very moment when it is captured. And this moment is one that structural film - and Owen Land as one of its initiators - has explored with consummate rigour, right down to the structure and substantial nature of its material. In addition, however, this »pre-post« also denotes the here-and-now of a return, the catching up with and anticipation of possible effects that structural and post-structural film of the 1960s and 1970s can still produce. The organizers of the project »Reverence – The Films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow)« cannot be praised too highly for having restored the oeuvre of this American pioneer and making it accessible to the public once more at a number of venues as of January 2005. The project was initiated and compiled by the British film curator Mark Webber. A good half of Land's work can be seen again – an oeuvre that derives its vitality both from internal connections, from »re-takes« and »re-enactments«, and from the implicit dialogue with its institutional environment. »Reverence« focuses precisely on this internal and external dovetailing of Land's films: for example, by placing individual re-takes at well-measured intervals to each other.

Finally, by ordering the works according to structural rather than chronological criteria, the show highlights the aforementioned »pre-post relationship«, which – a pretty rare phenomenon in art – helps elucidate earlier works on the basis of later ones. Or, also a rarity, allows films to be localized at the intersection of their Before and After. Incidentally, the same applies to the name of the filmmaker, which for some time has officially been »Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow)«.
When Land was still called Landow and was barely twenty years old, he produced some early masterpieces of structural film; for example, »Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc.« (1965/66), still Landow's best-known work, which contains exactly what the title promises. A Kodak test film used to adjust colour balance serves as the basic material. Landow recomposes it and extends it into a four-minute loop. The result, in which P. Adams Sitney saw »the essence of minimal cinema«, no less - »a found object extended to a simple structure« - is indeed captivating: on the left two cut-down frames showing a woman in red, with colour bars next to them; in the middle the sprocket hole with letters that rotate on the spot; on the right the picture of the woman again, cut down still further. A very visible join (as well as the winking of the woman) makes the looping process obvious, before it is undermined again by the dust particles that have multiplied with every stage of copying. A picture that does not budge a millimetre – and yet moves all the same. At least in small trace elements that evoke the mysterious impression of static mobility; but also with regard to the apparatus, which adds more traces, scratches, signs of wear etc. to the film every time it runs.

»Bardo Follies« demonstrates Landow's increasingly profound engagement with the carrier substance of film. It exists in various versions stemming from the period 1967-1976, and is taken up again in compressed form in the seven-minute fast-version »Diploteratology«. A short scene with a woman waving to a passing boat is gradually broken down into its stages of material disintegration: at first into circular spots on a black background, then by manipulating the celluloid itself (burning), which leads to ever more bizarre abstract forms. At the end (Stage 6), there is a looped reverse zoom shot that sounds out ghostly shapes in the depths of the burnt film grain, before once more abandoning these monstrous chimeras. And, indeed, wondrous danses macabres are presented to the eye, such as would not have been thought possible at the surface of the material (the trivial scene of someone waving). It is therefore no wonder that the titles »Bardo« and »Diploteratology« contain allusions to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is despite the fact that Landow himself changed from being a visionary Buddhist to a »liberal Christian« in the seventies – a change that he explored with the verve of a fresh convert, although not completely without irony, in the films »Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present« (1973) and »A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California« (1974).

Whereas in the latter it is possible to perceive a split awareness, above all in its stroboscopic structure, a number of other films represent subtle attacks on every form of »false perception«. »This is a film about you/ not about its maker,« we are told in repeated inserts, for example in »Remedial Reading Comprehension« (1970), which in the end allows all sorts of dream processes to collapse in the eye of its beholders. Among other things this is to distance itself from the lyrical cinema of a Maya Deren with its personal undertones. And it uses every means necessary for this purpose: advertising slogans, a fleeing director (Landow himself), a plea for »truly nourishing cinema«. A false perception of fiction is also foiled in a series of instructional films: »Institutional Quality« (1969) shows, and thus exposes, a test of perception before indulging in a study of the right way to put a film into a projector; »New Improved Institutional Quality« (1976) takes this kind of critique of institute and apparatus one step further by having the IQ test that is appropriated by the film carried out in a realistically furnished living room (or the examinee's mind) replete with a Camp-like homunculus.

Landow's »pre-post attitude« was to reach another high point in the film »Wide Angle Saxon« (1975), in which he made fun of avant-garde film's own rituals of initiation and conversion. Even the title combines ethnic, religious affiliation with the vocabulary of film. The storyline, which is quite narrative in a rough, fragmentary way, goes further: the main character, Earl Greaves, has an aha-experience after watching an experimental film (a parody of Landow's own »Remedial Reading Comprehension«), and decides henceforth to renounce his worldly possessions. In numerous allusions to Landow's own works and those of his fellow filmmakers (Anger, Frampton, Kubelka), the film implicitly expresses the failure to reach a higher form of intellectuality – not least in avant-garde film. In between comes a US news-reader in front of a backdrop of the Panama Canal, who, try as he may, cannot pronounce the name of the new military junta – a mocking reference to chauvinist, imperial views per se. And at the end comes the almost cliché-like awakening: »Oh, it was a dream!" By which Landow once more exposes the presumptuous claim of avant-gardism to have effectively countered illusionism.

»Reverence – The Films of Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow)« could be seen on 25 and 26 January 2005 in the Austrian Film Museum. Since then it has been touring various festivals and institutions in Rotterdam, London, Barcelona, Paris, New York etc. (information at www.filmmuseum.at or www.lux.org.uk). The book »Two Films by Owen Land«, ed. Mark Webber, London/Vienna 2005, has been published to coincide with this retrospective.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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