Owen Land

On the marriage broker joke, as cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious.

An interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion experience whilst watching an experimental film. (hcl.harvard.edu)

As Landow and his students were testing a new video camera, an elderly man began to talk to them about new technology. This impromptu conversation forms the basis for a comparison of spoken and written language. (hcl.harvard.edu)

A found, utilitarian object, the overtly moralizing educational film "How to be a Good Citizen," is elevated to the status of 'art'. First presented unaltered and then in Landow's color facsimile, the film is further modified by applying an opaque matte that creates a spatial paradox. (hcl.harvard.edu)

Landow rejects the dream imagery of the historical trance film for the self-referential present, using macrobiotics, the language of advertising, and a speed-reading test on the definition of hokum. The alienated filmmaker appears, running uphill to distance himself from the lyrical cinema, but remember, "This is a film about you, not about its maker." (hcl.harvard.edu)

An illustrator drawing figures that resemble Tibetan deities can't believe his eyes when they appear to come to life and dance on the paper; trapped between 2D and 3D space, the characters' eerie limbo is amplified by the sinister loop of the soundtrack. (hcl.harvard.edu)

A shot of a Southern Belle waving to a group of tourists on a pleasure boat ride is looped, multiplied and then melted, creating psychedelic abstract images. "A paraphrasing of certain sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in motion picture terms." (hcl.harvard.edu)

In his first 16mm film, Landow proposes that if we accept the reality offered to us by the illusion of depth on the flat plane of the screen, we can then assign reality to anything at will. A cinematic equivalent of the illusionistic portraiture of the Flemish painters. (hcl.harvard.edu)