Screening: DIALOGUES or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind

DIALOGUES or A Waist Is A Terrible Thing To Mind, Owen Land, 2007-2009, video, colour, sound, 120 mins. Introduced by Mark Webber
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). Dialogues is an episodic series of short films informed by the artist’s study of folklore, myth, history and the theology of all major religions, including Gnosticism and cabala. With a healthy dose of irony and a proudly irreverent attitude toward all kind of orthodoxies Land readily applies the structure of the Platonic dialogue to explore themes of reincarnation, art criticism, and Tantra. Some of the episodes contain events which are more speculative, or imaginative, than literally real.” The film also includes musings about Land’s artistic forebears and pastiches of other films, including The Graduate, Red Eye (called Craven Death Maven), most of Kenneth Anger’s films, and complex allusions to the films of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage.
REGROUPING is the first in a new annual LUX seminar programme, marking the opening of LUX’s new building in Waterlow Park. REGROUPING will include five days of presentations, workshops and screenings with artist and writer Ghislaine Leung to generate new discussions on the relation between artists and organisations today and, through this, the current cultural politics in which we live and work.