George Landow aka Owen Land

I've been thinking a lot about George Landow lately. 

Where is he?  The last time I saw him, I ran into him on the street in the West Village.  His long red hair was scraggly and he was staring into a shop window and talking to himself.  He barely recognized me.  I had interviewed him extensively for Film Culture.  I have pictures of him sitting in Allerton Park, sitting on a Foo Dog. 

According to the Wikipedia listing, he has made very few movies in the last 20 years, after changing his name to Owen Land.  Maybe he's in England.  A tour of his 70s films showed up at Harvard last year. 

I wish I could find those films, Wide Angle Saxon and his Christianity movies.  They are etched in my haunted consciousness.  Some samples can be seen at http://www.ubu.com/film/landow.html .  I keep hoping that -- like the works of Broughton and Brakhage and now some Anger -- Owenlandow's films will be issued on DVD.  And Bruce Baille.  And Ken Jacobs.  I won't hold my breath.

For better or worse, these are the films that move me.  I once spoke with Broughton and Brakhage in Montreal -- they were walking out of a screening together -- and they asked me if I was a filmmaker.  I said, no, I just wrote about experimental film.  They both seemed so sympathetic and sad at that.

Brakhage didn't exactly say, "That's an even more difficult way to make a living than it is making experimental films," but something like it.  Maybe he simply said, "You poor thing."  No, that would have been Broughton to have said something like that, stroking my hair most likely.  They're both gone now.

My own YouTube collection, particularly the Baudrillard series (yousleep.blogspot.com), would probably do quite well at the Ann Arbor Film Festival... of thirty years ago.  So much for being avant-garde.