''Remedial Reading Comprehension'' is an experimental short film by

Owen Land George Landow (1944 – June 8, 2011), also known as Owen Land, was a painter, writer, photographer and experimental filmmaker. He also worked under the pen names Orphan Morphan and Apollo Jize. According to the film historian Mark Webber, Land m ...

, produced in 1970.

Description

''Remedial Reading Comprehension'' takes the form of an ephemeral or educational film.Dixon, Wheeler W. (1997) ''The exploding eye: a re-visionary history of 1960s American experimental cinema,'' SUNY Press, p96 Land combines found colour footage, a mock television commercial about rice, text from a speed-reading manual, and footage of the director running, with the superimposed words, "This Is A Film About You... Not Its Maker."Robin Blaetz (2002) "Avant-garde Cinema of the Seventies," ''History of the American cinema,'' Volume 9, University of California Press, p473 The speed-reading text is taken from "Pupils into Students," an essay written by Jacques Barzun and published in ''Teacher in America (1945).''Conner, J.D. (2009) "What Becomes of Things on Film on Film: Adaptation in Owen Land (George Landow)," ''Adaptation,'' 2(2), 161–76 ''Remedial Reading Comprehension'' forms part of the

structural film Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. Overview The term was coined by P. Adams Sitn ...

movement of the 1960s and 70s, in that it considers "film itself as subject matter, its basic structures rather than its actual physical presence."Cook, Pam (1981) "The point of self-expression in avant-garde film," ''Theories of authorship: a reader,'' Routledge, p271-281 The film opens with a woman dreaming about an auditorium of people, who are sitting down as though about to watch a movie. In this scene, Land's camera assumes the point of view of the movie screen itself.Dixon, Wheeler W. (1995) ''It looks at you: the returned gaze of cinema,'' SUNY Press, p1-2, 56-7

Reception

''Remedial Reading Comprehension'' is considered a prominent and important work in the

movement. Scholar Fred Camper wrote that the film “does not try to build up an illusion of reality, to combine the images together with the kind of spatial or rhythmic continuity that would suggest that one is watching “real” people or objects. It works rather toward the opposite end, to make one aware of the unreality, the created and mechanical nature, of film.” Wheeler Winston Dixon wrote that "the film acts upon us, addressing us, viewing us as we view it, until the film itself ''becomes'' a gaze, rather than an object to be gazed upon.” J.D. Connor considered ''Remedial Reading Comprehension'' to be an "odd intervention" in the structural film movement, in that it retains "the Romantic interest in dreams and personae" away from which avant-garde cinema had been moving.

References

External links

* {{IMDb title, 0478015, Remedial Reading Comprehension 1970 films American avant-garde and experimental films 1970 short films 1970s avant-garde and experimental films 1970s English-language films 1970s American films

Description

Reception

See also

References

External links