A book based on
American experimental filmmaker Owen Land's last movie.
Dialogues is a self-reflexive feature film directed by the American experimental filmmaker Owen Land—formerly known as George Landow (1944–2011). The author of a powerful, critically-acclaimed but also exhilarating work, Land was a pioneer of structural cinema, the forms of which he developed and criticized at the same time in significant works such as A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley California (1974) and On the Marriage Broker Joke as Cited by Sigmund Freud in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious or Can the Avant-Garde Artist Be Wholed? (1977-79). As for Dialogues, one could consider it as a parody of Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, an analytical report of US popular music, a re-interpretation of Platon's dialogues about reincarnation, or just a hilarious if polemical essay about the male/female polarity. Let's say that Dialogues is a great contemporary literary text: that is why we decided to publish it as such. The book thus delivers the integral, annotated script of Land's latest—which unfortunately happens to be his last – film, the two-hour long Dialogues, released in 2009 and premiered at the Kunsthalle Bern. It is preceded by a critical essay penned by Chris Sharp and two interviews with Land.
Published on the occasion of Owen Land's exhibitions “Dialogues” at Kunsthalle Bern and “How can you believe anything he says?” at KW Berlin in 2009-2010?
Owen Land (1944–2011), formerly known as George Landow, was a painter, writer, photographer, and experimental filmmaker from Connecticut, USA. He also worked under the pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize. Land's films usually involve word play, and are filled with humor and wit, which for critic Mark Webber separates Land from the “boring” world of avant-garde cinema.
