George Landow (filmmaker)

George Landow aka Owen Land ( born 1944 in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, † June 8, 2011 in Los Angeles ) was an American avant-garde film director, experimental filmmaker, writer and photographer. He is considered a pioneer of structural film.

Life and work

Owen Land grew up as George Landow on in Connecticut. He studied drawing, painting, sculpture and industrial design at the Pratt Institute and the Art Students League of New York and the New York Academy of Art, he also studied acting and improvisation at the Goodman School of Drama in Chicago.

He also studied Classical and Flamenco guitar, piano and composition; Indian vocal and instrumental music at the Ali Akbar Kahn College of Music in San Rafael, California. He was a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, at the San Francisco Art Institute and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. George Landow changed his name to Owen Land in the early 1970s.

He was the founder of experimental theater workshop at the Art Institute of Chicago. Owen Land wrote and directed several musical theater pieces, with original songs and music, including "Mechanical Sensuality " and " Swimming with Wimmen ". Some of his first films from the 1960s and 1970s are among the first examples of the so-called " structural film", also referred to as minimalism in the film.

Lands films live from puns and subtle humor. They often parody the experimental " Structural film", for example in Wide Angle Saxon from 1975. His work is inspired by Bertolt Brecht, he borrows in education films, and can be influenced in his work by advertising and on television.

Owen Land was with some movies at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department of Film Acting: represent New American Cinema.

Retrospectives of Owen Lands films were the at the Edinburgh Film Festival in Scotland, in the American Museum of Moving Image in New York, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the Netherlands, at the Tate Gallery in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art and in Kunsthalle Bern shown.

Filmography

Literature and sources

  • Exhibition catalog: documentation fifth survey of reality - imagery today; Catalog (as folders ) Volume 1: (material); Volume 2: ( list of exhibits ); Kassel in 1972
  • Documenta Archiv (ed. ); Resubmission d5 - A survey of the archive to the documenta, 1972; Kassel / Ostfildern 2001, ISBN 3-7757-1121- X

Mark Webber, Two films by Owen Land

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