Re: Owen Land's DIALOGUES

From: Ryan Marino (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Mar 03 2009 - 18:33:12 PST


It's funny that this came up, just today actually I was wondering what Land
has been up to.

Undesirables sounds awesome.

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Mark Toscano <email suppressed> wrote:

> Hi Steve and all -
>
> I went and can provide some answers...
>
> Undesirables is/was a totally different project. Owen did recently add a
> couple of episodes to that fragment that was circulating, and, if I
> understand correctly, now considers it a finished 'unfinished' piece, like a
> finished fragment. i.e. I don't think he's doing anything further to it.
> He showed this 'finished' version at LA Filmforum last year, and I thought
> it was quite excellent.
>
> Dialogues comes from a script Owen's been working on, I believe, for at
> least a few years. About 2-3 years ago, when Owen arrived in LA, Morgan
> Fisher told me Owen was still finishing the script and had written a scene
> in which Melpomane, the muse of tragedy, tells Morgan Fisher that he's
> "basically a nerd." This sequence does, by the way, show up in the finished
> film.
>
> The film was presented as an advance preview at the Velaslavasay Panorama
> in West Adams district here, not too far from USC. It's an old movie
> theatre that Sara Velas & co. have fixed up into a wonderful venue for
> presenting diverse entertainments. A few scenes in Dialogues were shot at
> the Panorama, which is one of the reasons Owen wanted to do this screening
> there.
>
> Owen introduced the film, giving some suggestive notes and relating a story
> from the bible that provided the basis for one of the sequences, and which
> he thought might be obscure and worth elucidating on. I took a couple of
> photos and can put one up on my blog when I get a chance to download them
> from the camera. Some cast and crew were there too, and he introduced them.
> There was no Q&A afterward.
>
> The piece was shot largely or possibly entirely in HD video, and was
> projected from DVD at the show. It's two hours long, with an intermission a
> bit more than halfway through, by my guess. It's made up of a series of 50+
> individual sections, each with its own title. Two titles I remember off the
> top of my head are 'A Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind' and 'Glass Ashtrays
> Cast a Terrible Refraction'.
>
> The whole work is loaded with references, sometimes overwhelmingly so, to
> experimental films and filmmakers, curators, and other personalities of the
> 'scene', plus biblical allusions, philosophical and historical allusions,
> myth, poetry, music... it's really dense. It has a really odd soundtrack of
> assorted popular music, Meredith Monk, Zombies, Stevie Nicks, and all kinds
> of other stuff.
>
> Many of the sequences comprise somewhat self-contained plot fragments, with
> actors performing scripted dialogues. A few were more oblique or abstract.
> A couple at least comprised entire songs, with the complete lyrics -
> partially modified to reflect Owen's pseudo-autobiography and/or aspects of
> the film's storyline - scrolling onscreen. One of these songs was Tom
> Petty's 'Mary Jane's Last Dance'.
>
> The overall content seemed to, at least in part, present a sort of
> fragmented autobiography of Owen, part truth, part fiction, part something
> else. Lots of sex(uality) and nudity. Lots of wordplay. Minimal settings.
> Some sequences used the narrative tropes of porn. One of the more
> memorable for me in this regard was a sequence which begins with an onscreen
> text from Owen, explaining that Paul Arthur once referred to him as an
> iconoclast. If he was an iconoclast, Owen decided, he should go and smash
> some icons. So he went to a Russian (?I forget which - Hermitage maybe?)
> museum with a small sledge hammer to destroy a painting, a sequence which is
> then acted out. (By the way, two different actors portray Owen.) After
> being caught doing this, he is brought to the museum director's (?) office,
> and she is a young, scantily clad woman speaking with a Russian accent, who
> comes on to him and tells him she's glad he destroyed the painting. Anyway,
> the
> whole thing is played like a story setup for a porn film, and there's
> quite a bit of this going on.
>
> I realize this is an incredibly weird and unhelpful note about the piece,
> but it's kind of impossible to sum it up or give any kind of general idea of
> what it was like. It brought up a complex web of reactions and emotions
> from me. I found it funny, sad, touching, bizarre, brilliant, flawed, and
> just fucking weird.
>
> I've seen pretty much all of Owen's work done as George Landow, most of
> them many times, and found it really moving in a way to see this new piece
> which is clearly by the same guy, but which is also clearly deeply
> touched/tainted/affected by whatever he's been going through for the past 30
> years. It's very different than anything else he's done. But also so
> clearly a film by the same guy. And even though it's a narrowly trained
> piece in terms of its set of references, it doesn't feel like a throwback or
> nostalgic in some unevolved way in the slightest.
>
> Hope these disorganized thoughts are of some weird interest to people.
>
> mt
>
>
> --- On Tue, 3/3/09, Steve Polta <email suppressed> wrote:
>
> > From: Steve Polta <email suppressed>
> > Subject: Re: [FRAMEWORKS] Owen Land's DIALOGUES
> > To: email suppressed
> > Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2009, 3:23 PM
> > I'm very curious about this...
> >
> > Did anyone attend this event last weekend who can report on
> > this?
> > On the film? On Land's presentation?
> > Or does anyone have any information on this film or Owen
> > Land's recent work?
> >
> > Is DIALOGUES the same work that manifested a few years ago
> > as the fragment known as UNDESIREABLES?
> >
> > Information eagerly sought, on or off list...
> >
> > ———steve polta
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>

-- 
www.ryanmarinofilm.com
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.