Considered to be part of the structural film movement, Owen Land's "Remedial Reading Comprehension" combines found color footage in a manner which does not feel like the real rhythm of watching life, but rather embraces the unreal quality of watching pictures unfold on film. Land is known for embracing the quality of film itself rather than creating a narrative within his pieces.
The pieces begins with a woman's head at the bottom of the screen, and then a green blur appears at the top of the screen. The shot zooms into this blur, implying that the woman is dreaming about it. It stays unfocused and cuts back to the woman. Then it zooms in again and this time comes into focus. The shot transitions away from the green color and into a full color shot of people sitting in a room, presumably about to watch a film. The camera assumes the perspective of the film/screen where people will be watching it. I didn't realize this the first time I watched it, but after watching it a few more times I got the connection between this shot and the rest of the film- A man running, a commercial about rice, sounds of a dog barking, text being thrown at the viewer in flashes with sound to accompany it- and the text, THIS IS A FILM ABOUT YOU... NOT ABOUT IT'S MAKER. Once you really consider those words and watch the film again, you can start to embody the different people in the scenes and realize that everyone could do this on some level.
The film feels much longer than 4:50. Something about the way the images were cut together really made time stretch out for me as I watched it.
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