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Remedial Reading Comprehension
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Wikipedia article
'Remedial Reading Comprehension' is an experimental short film by Owen Land, 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), 16176
'Remedial Reading Comprehension' forms part of the structural film 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 structural film 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.
See also
* List of American films of 1970
References
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