Films by Owen Land and Paul Sharits

AD HOC #66

AD HOC presents the work of two of structural film’s greatest makers, Owen Land and Paul Sharits. Land, whose work long engaged comic sketch, allusion, community commentary, and joyous materialist punning, is represented with two essential works: What’s Wrong with This Picture? 1, in which a man wrestles to describe his television’s malfunctions in a tide of oversized captions, 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?, in which the classic ‘pander’ joke is expanded through a series of vignettes. Sharits laid out some of cinema’s most dramatic and violent perceptual challenges, and is represented here with two films that deal with the film strip and the act of projection, Tails, which uses light struck ends to form Sharits’ distinctive rhythms, and 3rd Degree, a simulation of the destructive accident of film immolating in the projection gate.

Free admission.

Program:

• What’s Wrong with This Picture? 1 (1971, 5 mins, 16mm)
• Tails (1976, 3.5 mins, 16mm)
• 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, 18 mins, 16mm)
• 3rd Degree (1982, 24 mins, 16mm)

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.

AD HOC = Stephen Broomer, Madi Piller, Jim Shedden, Bart Testa.

AD HOC would like to thank Alberto Zambenedetti, Denise Ing, Charlie Keil, Eyan Logan, Sean Rogers, and the staff of Innis College and the Cinema Studies Institute.