Film Catalog: Online Search

Owen Land

Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967) 16mm, black and white, silent, 7 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Science & Medicine

"His remarkable faculty is as maker of images ... the images he photographs are among the most radical, super-real and haunting images the cinema has ever given us." -- P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film Awards: Yale Film Festival, 1968; Berkeley Film Festival; Kenyon College Film Festival, 1968.

Rental: $21.00

Owen Land

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particals, etc. (1966) 16mm, color, silent, 4.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Films about Film, Media

"The richest frame I have seen in any film when you take into consideration all movements, lines, the beautiful white, and reds, and blacks," --Jonas Mekas, Village Voice

Rental: $30.00

Owen Land

A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California (1974) 16mm, color, sound, 11.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Political / Social Activism

"As an experience, it's mind-boggling." --Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times. "Because all footage is sound sync, this screening process hones our responses, until we see more in (Land's) 3-frame sequences than we would in hour-long doses of 'normal' time. Like the study of signs, this study of seconds yields a knowledge of people and truth inaccessible to more common observation." --B. Ruby Rich

Rental: $36.00

Owen Land

The Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968) 16mm, black and white, sound, 8.75 min

Genre: Experimental

... as profoundly strange as its title -- James Stroller, Village Voice

Rental: $29.00

Owen Land

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976) 16mm, color, sound, 10 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Comedy

"... happily represents the type of personal film which fits so many 'categories' it defies labelling. Film viewers need not recognize all the complexities of the film to enjoy it simply as an hilarious lampoon of academic intelligence tests in particular and educational films in general." --D. Marie Grieco, EFLA: Sightlines.

Rental: $30.00

Owen Land

No Sir, Orison! (1975) 16mm, color, sound, 2.75 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Structural

Orison means prayer. The title of the film is a palindrome, that is, it reads the same backward or forward. The film grew out of the attempt to create a structure around my first original palindrome, "no sir, orison," written while working on WIDE ANGLE SAXON. "No sir, orison" is the answer to a question. The question soon revealed itself to be: "what's this, meditation?" Someone is praying in the aisle of a ... church? No, a supermarket. The prayer, perhaps asking for God's mercy on those behind the evil practices of the "plastic" food industry -- people who have substituted disease-producing non-nutritive products for the God-given plants that were intended for human food -- is a silent protest against the supermarket and all that it represents: manipulation and exploitation of a gullible public to increase the wealth of a powerful elite. The next element to be added was the song, a reworking of an anonymous 17th century song "praising" tobacco. The film might have been entitled "Practical Solutions to the Problem of the Supermarket." The protagonist is played by an artist who calls himself Hermen Euticalcircle, with whom I have collaborated on several live performances.

Rental: $25.00

Owen Land

On The Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation of the Unconscious, Or Can the Avant-Garde Artist be Wholed? (1979) 16mm, color, sound, 17.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Psychology & Mental Health

"ON THE MARRIAGE BROKER JOKE ... turns upon an opposition of Freudian analysis and Christian hermeneutics .... Two pandas, who exist only because of a textual error, run a shell game for the viewer in an environment with false perspectives. They posit the existence of various films and characters, one of which is interpreted by an academic as containing religious symbolism. Sigmund Freud's own explanation is given by a sleeper awakened by an alarm clock." -- P. Adams Sitney

Rental: $54.00

Owen Land

Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970) 16mm, color, sound, 5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Films about Film, Media, Personal / Diary / Journal

Two kinds of material are used: 1) Material in the tradition of the "psycho-drama" or "personal film"; 2) Material of the sort used in industrial, educational, or advertising film. Questions are raised about the necessity of using acceptably "artistic" material to make a work of art, as well as about the relationships between "personal" and "impersonal" works. "One of the ways that REMEDIAL READING COMPREHENSION works is in the degree of filmic distance which each image has in the film. Distance here refers to the degree of awareness on the part of the viewer that the image he is watching is a film image, rather than 'reality.' [Land's] film does not try to build up an illusion of reality, to combine the images together with the kind of spatial or rhythmic continuity that would suggest that one is watching 'real' people or objects. It works rather toward the opposite end, to make one aware of the unreality, the created and mechanical nature, of film." -- Fred Camper, Film Culture

Rental: $20.00

Owen Land

Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973) 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 5.75 min

Genre: Experimental

"... devilishly difficult... to write anything coherent about this film, which I very much love, respect, and admire..." --John Luther

Rental: $20.00

Owen Land

What's Wrong With This Picture? (1972) 16mm, color & b/w, sound, 12.5 min

Genre: Experimental

Keywords: Comedy

"The first portion of this film is an old instructional film about being a 'good citizen,' presented intact; the second section is a color reconstruction of this black and white film by Land. The original film abounds in absurdities in both image and sound; [Land's] 'copy' is even more bizarre. Both are also extremely funny, and the humor is not totally without meaning: it comes out of the way that each line of dialog, each direction given, implies a situation or character so absurdly plodding as to be almost inconceivable. In [Land's] version he creates an additional paradox -- one of depth -- by matting out certain parts of the frame." -- Fred Camper

Rental: $39.00