Avant-gardist Owen Land Comes Out of the Shadows

Also slated for the Filmforum show is Undesirables (Condensed Version), an assemblage of scenes from another feature film Land began shooting in the 1990s but didn’t finish. Its subject is the New York avant-garde film scene of yesteryear, where Land made his own debut. “I’m going to try, before the Filmforum show, to put it all together,” he says. “All of the excerpts, plus the confusion ... I mean the conclusion. A Freudian slip.”

On the subject of his own years in the wilderness, Land is less forthcoming, though he notes that his decision to quit teaching left him without the university resources (free equipment, actors, etc.) that had facilitated his prolific filmmaking output, and so he found himself drifting away from movies and back to painting, even earning a belated master’s degree from the New York Academy of Art. Somewhere in there, he changed his name, though he denies this was done because of “a mysterious territorial dispute,” as was reported in the program notes for the Rotterdam retrospective. (Though there is, on one of the otherwise bare walls of his apartment, a handwritten chart titled “Homes I Bought.”) Then, in 2001, Land suffered a debilitating stroke, which left him partially paralyzed and unable to do much of anything but write. So, he jotted down five feature-length screenplays that can only be produced with the backing of a major studio. “I think they’re more conventional,” Land says of his projects. “Well, for me, they seem more conventional, but I think from the point of view of a studio, they’ll seem like really far-out art films, not like anything they’ve ever done.”

Mythopoeic dialoguist: Owen Land

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• Owen Land
• Ford Edge
• Rotterdam
• Hollywood
• George Landow

In the meantime, as Land readies Dialogues for its world premiere at Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Bern museum in April next year, he continues to push the boundaries of the moving image. “I think the motion-picture form as it is usually practiced in Hollywood and Europe — the narrative film — has become so overly conventionalized that it’s really destroyed itself,” he says. “There are so many possibilities that have never been explored. My role model in all this is James Joyce — the way he looked at the novel and tried to come up with a new form of telling a story in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I think Ulysses has a lot of correspondences to Dialogues: You have a story that is told in many fragmented episodes; they skip around in time and place; it’s hard to get oriented. Reading a novel, everything is a continuity, but reading Ulysses, there’s no continuity. How does that last chapter relate to what I’m reading now? And who is the crab? There was no crab before, and now you’ve got a talking crab!”

Owen Land will screen new work and appear at Los Angeles Filmforum at the Egyptian Theatre on Sunday, June 29 at 7 p.m. For more information, go to www.lafilmforum.wordpress.com.