Lawrence Jordan

Film by Lawrence Jordan, soundtrack by John Davis. Children's book illustrations intermingle with the alchemical and all kinds of animalia in Jordan's 2020 short.

An eight-minute film by titan of avant-garde animation, Lawrence Jordan.

Encounters in Light is the poetic documentation of two artists, friends, and lovers. The film eschews any biographical structure and instead looks at the ways these two artists are bound by time and light. Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure have extensive bodies of work between them. The film interweaves Joanna’s poetry, Lawrence’s films, personal interviews, and emotive imagery to produce a sensory engagement with a long lasting friendship and artistic practice. An understanding of mortality is ever present and the film let’s that feeling permeate throughout. How does one relate to years of love, friendship, and art? How does it resonate in the present moment? In the film, there is a sense of boundlessness and understanding that indeed, time dissolves all boundaries until there is only the possibility of light.

A new and original collage film by Lawrence Jordan.

This short piece is somewhat romantic, despite its title. We do see the ogre however. He inverts himself into the action throughout the film. As usual, the action is partly symbolic, partly surreal.

An animation which lifts off and proceeds with the delicacy of a soap bubble. Conceived as a tiny interlude between longer films: a chance to catch one's breath after and before more aggressive works, a "time out" period for the mind to float effortlessly and free of gravity.

The film, an animation, unfolds in three acts: Act I, "Cyrano", wherein Cyrano makes all manner of boasts and compares his lady-love to the marvels of the universe; Act II, " Prometheus", in which pagan forces are compared with the supposed genteel nature of the 19th century; Act III, "Time Travel", wherein there is a hop-scotch of Time Travel! In which the viewer moves among various 'times', partially drawn entirely from imagination, partially from allusion to specific visual historic and pre-historic periods. It is not a straight-line progression, rather a flipping back and forth through glimpses of various ages, carried along by the surreal antics of its objects and characters.

This is a classing Jordan animation, primarily in B/W, with touches of color. Actually, the engraved art work was film on color negative, so that subtle variations in tone are recorded. The mood--enhanced by John Davis' original music--is dream-like. It is both lyric and crackling, producing a kind of anticipatory tension. The scenes, in the usual Jordan manner, follow the surreal principle of placing objects and people where the ought not to be, and making movements that in the waking world are impossible. Each scene is a kind of drama from another world.

In Entr'acte II the walls come tumbling down. The wheels come off the wagon: Thunder, Lightning, Explosive meditations. Everything seems to be happening at once. Then, before you can catch your breath, it's over.

The filmmaker pays homage to the two men who most influenced his initial film work: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Buñuel (surrealism in cinema).

Joanna wanted a film on the collages of Max Ernst, and I wanted to make a tribute to the two men who most influenced my film work at the beginning: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Bunuel (surrealism in cinema). I had written a book of about one-hundred pages in the surrealist tradition of "automatic writing," which I called the "Cloud Journal." I thought I could marry some of the text of the journal with the collages of Ernst's UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE, along with bits of my own animation. So I shot the film on day one of the Ernst collage novel (example: lion), and used the first sixteen pages of my journal. I enlisted my friend and collaborator, Leroy Clark, to narrate and engineer the sound. We finished up digitally, then on 16mm film (the original format). I have nothing esoteric to say about this film, except to explain the title: it is a tribute to Luis Bunuel. There is no walrus in the film, as there is no dog in UN CHIEN ANDALOU.

A series of vaudeville acts inserted in images of reality, meant to demonstrate the ephemeral nature of all things.

A 'found-footage' film, original too shrunk to print on 16mm, it was made as one of four films for a project called GRAVITY SPELLS, an album of film and new music by John Davis, my collaborator in sound. The title derives from a title in the footage: THESE DRIVING DEMONS START YOUNG, and proceeds to show soap box derby races. I made a soap box racer and drove it in the official derby when I was about nine years old. The footage goes on to show various race cars, races, collisions, road cars racing and strange mobile contraptions, including rocket cars and exploding motorcycles. And of course mad drivers. All in the 1920s.

Dante's fantasy of hell, and his yearning after the Epic Poetry form of Virgil, the Latin poet. Again the magnificent illustrations of Gustav Dore, the actual inspiration for the film. Presented on each of the seventy-six illustrated first edition plates, a fast-moving condensed version of INFERNO takes place, with a voice speaking the appropriate lines of Dante, according to the Lawrence Grant White English translation.

An exploration into 19th century death mystiques, which rely heavily on the supernatural, along with a belief in, or at least a fascination with, fairy magic, much of it implied through subtle imagery. In all, it is a fascinating and astonishingly replete compendium of spiritual endeavor, the 19th century literary body of work that is, along with such masterful illustrators as Gustave Dore and others. These authors were passionately interested in what is noble and what is depraved, a far cry from present day ethics.

I have continued the dream-like form of disparate animated scenes, each with its own "romantic-with-an-edge" slightly surreal flavour. Scenes are sometimes run-on, sometimes separated by brief periods of darkness to relax, as in breathing, the viewing eye. There are no fancy superimpositions now, nor excessive visual trickery, only a comparatively straight forward presentation of the improbable images, which have formed themselves in my improbable mind.

In explaining the process of SOLAR SIGHT II, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "Many of the approaches to the cut-out material are the same as in part SOLAR SIGHT I, however SOLAR SIGHT II is a much different film. It is more meditative. It has a somewhat slower pace. I tried to let the cut-outs float more gracefully. Again, John Davis' music forms an integral part of the meditation. I have used that word 'meditation' because that is how some very astute friends of mine described it to me on first viewing. The approach is partly planned, partly improvised under the camera. There has been little or no editing outside the camera for many years in my animation. All effects are done in camera."

In describing the foundations for SOLAR SIGHT, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "A question I had in mind was: what's the place of the human being in the cosmos? More and more we think about what is 'beyond.' Less and less is art concerned. I don't know why. The question seems a bit grandiose but I approached it quite simply. I have never worked with color photography as primary background to cut-out animation before. I was surprised that the result was so powerful (helped by John Davis' very resonant music). It was liberating to release human figures into an apperception of suggested space, along with the primordial enigma of the revolving sphere."

On ancient star maps of magnificent color quality, experimental animator Lawrence Jordan takes the viewer out of this world into a world of cosmic imagination.—Canyon Cinema

Where all is static motion; where music and light become one; where change and motion become one; and where the end is the beginning. Black and white cut-out animation with touches of color. Ladies of the past encounter science and natural phenomena.

If there is such an old-fashioned thing as "stream of consciousness" in cinema, I suppose this is it. It certainly felt like a flowing stream or river while I was editing day after day, fitting found-sound to found (out-take) footage accumulated over almost sixty years of filmmaking. All the images and sounds buried on reels and spools in the studio came into the light. I felt singularly blessed to be making a non-linear visual autobiography; for it is a fact that most of my life in film is there. The one guiding principle for the construction of the film was the ancient Russian proposal: "instead of canned plays, see a rose, hear a bomb." - Lawrence Jordan

For a long time, i have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engraving of the 19th century which illustrated "young peoples" adventure stories. Eventually, through a great deal of selection, such a film fell into place. I have attempted to present the high emotional overlay of very mundane events in this "alchemical melodrama". To that end, Puccini combines with blatant sounds of police sirens and old door buzzers on the sound track, while "real" and nightmare images compete for screen time.

The poet's dreams a maiden's bubbles through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.

The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen. Many are constructed out of one of Jordan's favorite engravings illustrators: Poyet. Duels occur on a tight rope. Heavier-than- air machines fly (and sometimes crash). Below guns spear exploding spheres. The timing of the animation is exquisite, existing in an atmosphere balanced between frenzy and delight.

Lawrence Jordan used forty-six engraved Gustave Doré illustrations from "Idylls of the King" as settings for his extravagantly romantic saga. As Enid, the protagonist, is seen in a vast array of scenes from deep forests to castle keeps. Her champion is sometimes with her, sometimes away fighting archetypal foes. She dies and, through the magic of Gustav Mahler's resurrection symphony, lives again. Jordan explores themes of love, death and resurrection.

POSTCARD FROM SAN MIGUEL is perhaps the most mystical of all the films from Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych. On the surface, it is merely a postcard from the picturesque Mexican colonial town of San Miguel de Allende. Underneath is the mysterious quest for the filmmaker's dream-lover.

The film is simply the internal, subliminal (poetic) thoughts of an aging woman poet as she travels the world, alone, probably for the last time, thinking of a friend she has lost. Finally, she returns home to write ("write or die"). These story elements are all included in the last long poem of H.D. when she was in her 80s. - Lawrence Jordan

The Grove is the second part of Lawrence Jordan's H.D. Trilogy. It continues what began with THE BLACK OUD (again featuring Joanna McClure as the catalyst) and concludes in STAR OF DAY.

The Black Oud represents a subtle new direction in documentary. I have used the term 'bio-documentary' to describe this slight, though essential, difference between my film and the majority of personal or experimental documentaries made in the last decade.

The Visible Compendium constructs bits of unnamed meanings, fragments of light. Photography is, to me, not about things, but about light. Light is our primary reality when we are at the movies. Light which suggests things, the secondary reality, a construct by the mind.

TAPESTRY, part of Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych and filmed much later in Jordan's life, is a charged record of his bachelor life after marriage and child-rearing.

Five years in the making, Lawrence Jordan's feature-length "alchemical autobiography" Sophie's Place takes as its inspiration the story of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Sophia. Writes Jordan, "I must emphasize that I do not know the exact significance of any of the symbols in the film any more than I know the meaning of my dreams... I hope that the symbols and the episodes set off poetic associations in the viewer. I mean them to be entirely open to the viewer's own interpretation."

Subtitled “Eros in Psyche” and set to a composition by Tomaso Albinoni, Lawrence Jordan’s rapturous live action short contemplates two nude figures in California idyll. They remain physically separated but Jordan’s spellbinding cutting and tactile camerawork suggest a loosening of inhibition. Parisian fountains and classical statues signal the deep cultural bedrock for the filmmaker’s ostensibly freewheeling portraiture.

Though best known for his collage films, Lawrence Jordan here makes exquisite study of the different aspects of light lilting through the early morning fog of California winter. Painterly gradations of color and juxtapositions in scale are beautifully arranged to music by Antonio Vivaldi.

Part of a trio of films that also includes ADAGIO and WINTER LIGHT, IN A SUMMER GARDEN "draws much of its power from the way it is constructed and the ways it deals with images... [T]he camera pans and pauses, almost passively looks at the fields of flowers, and then plunges through them, carrying us through space." - Robert Haller

For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color background. The film is mood-filled: A duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a masquerade ball. Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman between them appears, cat-masked. The mask dissolves away. Her spirit passes into the face of the sun upon the sun upon the sun flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him.

Cut-out animation alternated with text collages.

Lawrence Jordan's portrait of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.

Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978. The pace is un-irritating, in contrast to the San Francisco of today; but unlike the equal weight Helen Levill gives to all her subjects, there is an internal evolutionary development in the Jordan film that ultimately delivers a story. Until the introduction of the human protagonist, poet Michael McClure, we are treated to an extravagant display of visual delights.

Ancestors is a film about spiritual forefathers and mothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together - all my creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute. Like part 2 of Duo Concertantes, it's a moving single picture, now doubled.

Orson Welles reads the poem especially for this film by Larry Jordan, which is dedicated to the late Wallace Berman, and is made possible by a grant from The National Endowment Of The Arts.

A full production: sync-sound drama with cast, crew, color neg., and 16mm wide screen cut-off (normal projector and lens). My intention was to follow James Agee's idea to present "an imaginary story against a background of reality." The imaginary story is of Paul Rose and his past incarnation as a woman in classical Greek times. I collaborated with George Kuchar, who did special sets for the film.

We are first presented a cobweb castle, filled with the haunting doubts of the young protagonist. Spirits appear on the screen and are heard on the soundtrack. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world.

An accurate depiction of the basic tenets of northern Mahayana Buddhism, cast into living or "experiential" form, consistent with powerful mantras heard on the soundtrack of the film. Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Lama, was the advisor.

In a woodland, a foolish, bungling magician prepares a potion to aid Hildur, the fairy queen, in rescuing her ward, a princess, who has been abducted by a gnome. The wicked "mortal queen" has threatened the princess with death. By an accident, the magician's potion causes Hildur to become mortal, although subliminal recollections of her mystic existence remain to haunt her.

A ghost story with an unstructured plot set amidst the mysteries of an old house. Mood is dominant over plot, and heightened by musical accompaniement.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Fast-moving impressions of the Big Sur, the water, the ocean, and the Ladies, as part of the landscape, swimming, or running nude, against the sun or part of the sun.

Avant-garde short by Lawrence Jordan.

A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels, and geriatric clocks.

"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan." —Canyon Cinema

In EIN TRAUM DER LIEBENDEN [A DREAM OF LOVERS], Monk meanders through a maze of Minoan bull-leaping, satyrs and revelatory rainbows.

Jordan’s imagery is exquisite and eloquent, concentrating on simple, repeated use of particularly poetic symbols and figures, a conglomerative effect of old Gustave Dore drawings, 19th century whatnot memorabilia, all fused to a totally aware perception. —Lita Eliseu, East Village Other

(Now) famous sculptor artist George Herms displays drawings on butcher paper as the filmmaker’s daughter plays with colors of light.

A little boy swings, breaks sticks, looks up into the sky, himself a cherub, while on the soundtrack Chad and Jeremy sing "and if a hundred boys should die, we can send a hundred more." An anti-war film made in the Vietnam era.

One of Lawrence Jordan's earliest animated films, PINK SWINE is an energetic and playful mix of various animation styles. Described as "an anti-art dada collage film," this free-form short presents cut-out images animated across old photos (a style picked up by Terry Gilliam a few years later) and found objects that dance to the beat of the rock-and-roll soundtrack. He produced this short during a summer spent with Joseph Cornell and Jordan edited the film entirely in camera, making the upbeat visual rhythm of this delightful lark even more impressive. –Sean Axmaker

Painter and collage artist, Jess (Collins) performs 41 (now lost) collages to (his) selected sound bits in the manner of a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon.

A simple contemplation of the plum tree through a window. In rich black and white.

A kinetic collage of superimposed warm, soft-colored 16mm film set to percussive jazz, Lawrence Jordan's PORTRAIT OF SHARON features beat poet Kirby Doyle on a motorcycle and Sharon "Didi" Morill, poet and onetime girlfriend of the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, blinking her big eyes and sharing her youth with the camera. Landscapes and clouds dance in rhythm, conjuring the contemporary spirit of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." - Stela Jelincic

A game of 9-pins played among the stars.

A celebration of the filmmaker’s daughter’s birth. The blazing garden as a metaphor for the cycle of life.

From a central pivotal position, the camera eye (in this case, the hard and inflexible eye of Minerva) looks out upon twelve passing scenes. None of the scenes are necessarily associated with specific signs of the Zodiac. Lawrence Jordan instead assembled twelve of his collages and passed them in review before the deity (who, as he has noted, never revealed her pleasure or displeasure with these images). The filmmaker underscored the mood of each scene with a short passage of music. One might say that theses scenes are not meant to convey particular meanings to a viewer but are intended to represent various entrances or, as the Egyptians called them, hidden or false doors to the siprit world, the world of the dead, the Underworld, the Bardo or, simply, another plan of reality: verities of the soul in Symbolist terms.

In describing the basis for TRIPTYCH IN FOUR PARTS, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "Part one is the Portrait of a North Beach artist, John Reed. Part two and three take place in the desert of the Southwestern United States and Mexico, where I went in quest of, and found, the natural habitat of the peyote cactus. I watched this sacred plant cut and dried for the Indians of the Native American Church. I consumed peyote on numerous occasions. In later years when I red Castineda’s books on the teachings on Don Juan I realized that Mescalito was not a figment of Don Juan’s imagination, and that there is a spirit world whether we like it or not. Part four is a document of the time, and exemplifies the poetry that was in me at that time."

"Human qualities migrate through light and shadow... Like flames and waves, the dead and the living course through this world... without weight through space and time."

Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Lawrence Jordan portrays male sexual frustration while slyly satirizing Hollywood reaction shots.

In the rarely-seen THREE, one begat three became two and then one again.

The wanderings (and Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych) begin in the late 1950s when the filmmaker joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and sailed through stormy and serene weather to the Orient. WATER LIGHT is an impression of that far wandering.

The young man, played by Stan Brakhage, gets himself into a seriously comic mix-up by indulging in semi-sexual fantasies, and allowing the fantasies to take over. This is the best of my very early films and includes my first footage.

Fantasy/psycho-drama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.

A woman reads Philip Lamantia's poem (from which the film gets its title), which evokes masculine angst as the hand acts out the scenario of the poem.

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.

Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As the four young men continue disconnected activities, the other two become a couple. When the four realize something has changed, first they stare at the couple who have kissed and now are dancing slowly. The four run from the house in a kind of frenzy and return to stare. The power of sex has unnerved them.

An anatomy of violence. Four young men and two young women are on a drive. There's a rivalry between two guys for one of the girls. On a remote road, the car stalls. The driver hitchhikes for help. Led by the intrepid girl, the others walk toward abandoned buildings, perhaps a mining operation. One of the three guys sits and reads. The intrepid one explores the building and sees something that scares her. She screams; the two rivals and the second girl run to find her. Something she says starts a fight between her two suitors. The one reading a book walks away in disgust. After stopping the fight, the two young women follow. How can this end?

Includes: CARROUSEL, JACK'S DREAM, THIMBLE THEATRE | Cornell's editing has not been tampered with. It is sometimes minimal (the editing), sometimes extensive, always sensitive. I did not change it, as when I did the entire re-edit of Cornell's Legend for Fountains. JACK'S DREAM, for instance, is a puppet animation into which Cornell has inserted a few shots from other material - just enough to throw it into the sphere of artful fantasy. Whereas CARROUSEL is a fully edited animal piece. There is no way now of determining the order in which the films were made, or even the exact years, but it was some time in the '40s.

Includes: CHILDREN'S PARTY, COTILLION, THE MIDNIGHT PARTY | These are the first three of the six films Cornell gave me to finish before he died. I have not changed the editing structure. I have made the films printable. They are the first known fully collaged films, i.e., films made from found footage, and were done sometime in the '40s. Cornell combines Vaudeville jugglers, animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of "montage" or cinematic progression. He collects images and preserves them in some kind of cinematic suspension that is hard - impossible - to describe. But it's a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art.