A question that one should never ask an experimental film-maker is: "What is your film about?" George Landow, who has died unexpectedly aged 67, would probably have responded: "It's about eight minutes." Along with many other "structural" American film directors in the 1960s and 1970s, Landow – who changed his name to the semi-anagram Owen Land in 1977 – rejected linear narrative, giving primacy to the shape and essence of film. "I didn't want to make films that were narrative. I found the whole traditional narrative approach was really non-visual," he commented.
This is demonstrated in the self-explanatory title of Landow's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1966). What he called "the dirtiest film ever made" consists of four identical images of a blinking woman, off-centre, made to appear as a loop without a beginning and end, giving prominence to the sprocket holes and edge lettering on the 16mm film, components that audiences do not normally see. Landow used "found footage", in this case a Kod- ak colour test, throughout his oeuvre, where film itself is the subject matter.
Landow later parodied his early experimental films and those of his mentors, Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos, with jokey titles such as 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). This features two actors dressed as pandas who discuss film in a false-perspective room patterned with checks and polka dots. "What is a 'structural film'?" asks one. "That's easy, everybody knows what a structural film is," comes the reply. "It's when engineers design an aeroplane, or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will soon fall apart. The film shows where all the stresses are." The pandas then suggest strategies for marketing Japanese salted plums illustrated by a Japanese publicity film created to look like found footage.
This was the last film Landow made before becoming Owen Land and leaving the underground film scene for more than three decades. He reappeared with his last film, Dialogues (2009). Little is known of his movements in between. He spent a year in Japan and taught film at US universities throughout the 1970s, and settled in Los Angeles in 2006.
Landow was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and began making films in high school. He studied drawing, painting and sculpture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1980s, he studied at the New York Academy of Art, from which he graduated with a master of fine arts degree, because he felt he would earn more money as a painter than as a film-maker. He studied acting and music at various colleges before teaching film production for some years in Chicago where he founded the Experimental Theatre Workshop.
"I never studied film formally," Landow stated. "I think the films I make are much more related to painting than to film as commonly taught." His short films began to be shown at experimental venues in 1963 with his first 16mm work, entitled Fleming Faloon, which draws attention to the illusion of depth as presented on a flat picture plane. Bardo Follies (1967), which shows a woman, in garish 1930s Technicolor, waving goodbye to a group of tourists on a pleasure boat, ends with the film burning frame by frame. ("A paraphrasing of certain sections of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in motion-picture terms," the director explained.) Landow used animation in Film That Rises to the Surface of Clarified Butter (1968), which has an illustrator drawing two Tibetan animal deities, which come to life and do a little dance.
Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970), in the form of an educational film that is part of a woman's dreams, uses colour footage of an auditorium of people who are about to watch a film, a mock television commercial about rice, text from a speed-reading manual, and the director himself running, with the superimposed words, "This is a film about you … not about its maker."
Landow flirted with various religions including Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity. This was expressed in Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973), which combines the face of a woman in ecstatic, contemplative prayer intoning the word "God", with shots of an animal rights activist, and a scantily clad model advertising Russian cars at the International Auto Show, New York. A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned By Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California (1974) showed footage of a radical Christian group's lecture tour of US colleges, edited in a rapid rhythm. The palindromically titled No Sir, Orison! (1975) focuses on a man in a supermarket kneeling down to ask forgiveness for those involved in the industry which produces unwholesome processed food. Wide Angle Saxon (1975) is an interpretation of The Confessions of Saint Augustine featuring an ordinary middle-aged man who undergoes a conversion to Christianity while watching an experimental film.
In New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976), a middle-aged man attempts to carry out a test full of seemingly meaningless instructions before entering transcendence through a woman's shoe.
Dialogues, his valedictory film, was based on his own bizarre and comic sexual encounters with women and his relationship with his contemporaries, including a mocking portrait of Maya Deren, the avant-garde film-maker. He was given a retrospective at the Rotterdam film festival in 2005. This programme then moved to the Tate Modern in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. In 2009, his work was presented at the Kunsthalle in Bern and the Kunst-Werke, Berlin.
Landow died as mysteriously as he had lived. His death was announced a month after his body was found in his Los Angeles apartment.
Mark Webber writes: Owen Land's visual inventiveness and irreverent wit made him one of my favourite film-makers, and one of the most accessible to those with little interest in avant-garde cinema. He was also one of the more mysterious and eccentric figures. In 1997, we exchanged letters while he was living in Berkeley and shooting Undesirables, a revisionist history of avant-garde film. He vanished again in 1999 and it was speculated that he had died. He had in fact suffered a stroke that left him debilitated. In 2003, I discovered a telephone number that I suspected might be his mother's and after some deliberation I rang the number and an old lady answered. I explained I was trying to find the film-maker Owen Land, who I thought might be her son. She seemed confused. When I asked to speak to Owen, her response was, "I don't know any Owen", but when I asked to speak to George, it was, "George? Sure! George, telephone for you."
Having re-established contact, we maintained a correspondence and I developed plans for the touring retrospective and the book Two Films by Owen Land. Owen's sudden move to Hollywood in 2006 was a logical decision – where would you go if you wanted to make a movie? He described Dialogues as being the legend of Parsifal in which the protagonist, surrounded by hedonists, is a "pure fool" who thinks he can find the Holy Grail "between a maid's legs". The production of Dialogues was troubled, and an amusing "making of" documentary was posted online by disgruntled staff. The film has flashes of inspiration, and some genuine laughs, but is often tainted by crass, sexist humour. On the subject of his personal spiritual quest, he told me he never belonged to any sect or radical religious group, though he "visited many". He confessed to owning a copy of the Bible on microfiche, but maintained that religious prophecies have a "margin of error of plus or minus 3%".
• George Landow (Owen Land), film-maker, born 1944; found dead 8 June 2011
