1966 George Landow
This post catches up with earlier works of Landow, that reveal his fascination with the transcendence of a frame of reference, beyond the image and the material to light as force.
Key historian of American avant-garde cinema, P. Adams Sitney, championed George Landow as “the most devout of structural filmmakers and perhaps the most sublime”(Sitney, 1969). Giles Deleuze praised the work and used it to hang his argument for a shift into a cinema of non-human perception, “George Landow… L-A-N-D-O-W. A great American filmmaker.” (Deleuze, 1982, Seminar 8) He seemed to accentuate Landow’s name here, even though, or because the artist formally known as George Landow became Owen Land five years earlier.
Deleuze’s difficulty of recognising Land’s transition seems like an affront and antagonistic to his own train of thought, of the fluidity of phenomena, it doesn’t make sense in the contemporary age of access to immediate documents on the internet. Perhaps back then, he may have once read, but forgot, so tried to assert what he had at hand, an earlier P. Adams Sitney article with the artist named as Gerorge Landow.
G-E-O-R-G-E-L-A-N-D-O-W
O-W-E-N-L-A-N-D
A-P-O-L-L-O-J-I-Z-E
Land’s work concerns the radical movement of a frame of reference, from the image as representation; a mannered, mechanical and commodified image, through to the image as material – structural; grain, exposure, scratch, to the loss of image; only light passing through the holes in the image-material, the gap where the image once was.
Landow premiered this film as loop at the Film-Makers Cinematheque, calling it ‘This film will be interrupted after ten minutes by a commercial’. True to its title, the film was interrupted with an 8mm interjection of Rembrandt’s Town Council as reproduced by Dutch Master Cigars.
(P Adams Sitney, Structural Film)
So McEwans lager isn’t so far off. There is something lost in the translation to a linear film print. Landow’s early projection performances seemed to suggest the use of a loop, that is played until Landow decided to stop, here after 10 minutes of repetition. So the work might have had a definite transition between the 16mm loop and the 8mm advert. Has anyone seen the Rembrant ‘Town Council’ spot? Please post a link in the comments if you find it.
Bardo Follies 1967. George Landow
There seems to be three versions, a roughly 50 minute, a 25 minute and an 19 minute. Here is P. Adams Sitney’s account from ‘Structural Film’, Film Culture Reader:
The film begins with a loop-printed image of a water flotilla carrying a woman who waves to us at every turn of the loop. After about ten minutes (there is a shorter version, too), the same loop appears doubled into a set of circles against the black screen. Then there are three circles for an instant. The film image in the circles begins to burn, creating a mouldy, wavering, orange-dominated mass. Eventually, the entire screen fills with one burning frame, which disintegrates in slow motion in an extremely grainy soft focus. Another frame burns; the whole screen throbs with melting celluloid. Probably, this was created by several generations of photography off the screen-its effect is to make the screen itself seem to throb and smoulder. The tension of the silly loop is maintained throughout this section, in which the film stock itself seems to die. After a long while, it becomes a split screen of air bubbles in water filmed through a microscope with coloured filters, a different colour on each side of the screen. Through changes of focus the bubbles lose shape and dissolve into one another and the four filters switch. Finally, some forty minutes after the first loop, the screen goes white. The film ends.
Sitney mis-described the film a little. The woman isn’t being caried, she is sitting beside the stream, and she’s not waving at us, she’s waving to the right, towards the boat. It is a little strange that he writes this, then recently complains that Deleuze mis-described the film too. Deleuze imagines the opening scene of the film to be about a swimmer, who causes waves to form around her, rather than waving with her hand. The actual scene [I think – but with both of these illustrious writers describing it differently, the film might well be supernatural !?] is amazing in its fake feel, it’s not just the mannered wave, as if she is employed to sit there and wave at the over-stacked boatload of Disney refugees, the scene feels like Léger’s Ballet méchanique, set in the landscape of Duchamp’s Étant donnés. Some research reveals that the women were initially employed to distract tourists from dead plants, then caught on as a commodified erotic spectacle.
Here is the scene so you can have a better sense of it:
Deleuze (1982) appears tremendously impressed by a rough translation of Sitney’s idea of the work, or the semi-memory of seeing it, to draw connection between the film, Buddhism and Bergson, with the help of Carlos Castaneda, in his Seminar on Cinema: The Movement Image. He states, the film stops representing the image and becomes the granular, through a flickering journey into death. He says so elegantly, ‘Let us stop. Let us stop the world’ when the image no longer moves and the grain begins to melt, loosing representation, just the loss of material cinema in the bubbles of acetate and gelatine. Then there are holes between the grain, these holes, of nothingness, “become conduits for lines of force, which are sometimes lines of light, bringing accelerated movement” [back to the screen].
As another aside, Castaneda’s neo-shamanic work in the 1990s could be important for an exploration of the embodiment of the ‘lines of force’. Check out the Tensegrity® Cleargreen Incorporated. So now cinema moves from image to force, which can be channeled through Qigong like meditation/ control of breath and body, rephrased as a magical pass through the body by a seer.
In 2019 Sitney gave a lecture at Stanford University, where he attempted to show that Deleuze similarly ‘corrected’ Bergson’s insights to support positions promoted by Cahiers du cinema.
[It’s not publicly available as far as I can see, but again, if you find it, please comment here.]
Owen Land, speaking at LAFF in 2009 spoke about a mythopoetic autobiographical film that he was making, using comments made by film critics, including Ian White, to enact a persona of Owen Land. This suggests that Owen Land becomes a conduit for a displaced subjectivity, his persona is incorporated into a mythologised or secondary account of his life. He lives and makes art as a diffused artist, formed in part by his audience, a diffuse collaboration.
This is the approach to my work here at LUX, that Owen Land can become part of myself as a posthumous maker of an Owen Land work, called ‘I Grog, and its alternatives’. Or maybe I become part of what was once Owen Land, borderless and indistinct.
Some notes:
Sitney, P.A. (1969) Structural Film in Ed P. Adams Sitney (1970) The Film Culture Reader. Available online at http://arthurtuoto.com/Structural-Film-Sitney.pdf [last accessed 06.03.2022]
Gilles Deleuze
Seminar on Cinema: The Movement-Image
Lecture 08, 19 January 1982 –
https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/seminars/cinema-movement-image/lecture-08
