New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops

  • Owen Land |
  • 1976 |
  • 10 minutes |
  • COLOR |
  • OPT

Rental Format(s): 16mm film

A reworking of an earlier film, Institutional Quality, in which the same test was given. In the earlier film the person taking the test was not seen, and the film viewer in effect became the test taker. The newer version concerns itself with the effects of the test on the test taker. An attempt is made to escape from the oppressive environment of the test - a test containing meaningless, contradictory, and impossible-to-follow directions - by entering into the imagination. In this case it is specifically the imagination of the filmmaker, in which the test taker encounters images from previous Land films .... The test taker is "initiated" into this world by passing through a shoe (the shoe of "the woman who has dropped something") which has lost its normal spatial proportions, just as taking the test has caused the test taker to lose his sense of proportion. As he moves through the images in the filmmaker's mind, the test taker is in a trance-like state, and is carried along by some unseen force .... At the end of the film the test taker is back at his desk, still following directions. His "escape" was only temporary, and thus not a true escape at all.

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  Fee  
16mm film $35.00  

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