Larry Jordan is an independent filmmaker who has been working in the Bay Area in California since 1955, and making films since 1952. He has produced some 40 experimental and animation films, and three feature-length dramatic films. He is most widely known for his animated collage films. In 1970 he received a Guggenheim award to make SACRED ART OF TIBET. His animation has shown by invitation at the Cannes Film Festival. Jordan is one of the founding directors of Canyon Cinema Cooperative. He has shown films and lectured throughout the country. He is presently chairman of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute.
"Jordan is one of the most prolific and accomplished stalwarts of the Bay Area independent film community. He takes full advantage of the tendency of disparate objects to take on new meaning, and form new relationships when they are brought into close proximity or when their usual context is changed. While these film collages link together a myriad of symbolic forms in new combination, the smooth, lyrical progression of the work results in a powerful sense of wholeness and totality." - Hal Aigner, San Francisco Chronicle "One thing: If I'd have to name one dozen really creative artists in the independent (avant-garde) film area, I'd name Larry Jordan as one. His animated (collage) films are among the most beautiful short films made today. They are surrounded with love and poetry. His content is subtle, his technique is perfect, his personal style unmistakable." - Jonas Mekas
Recently restored by Anthology Film Archives
Stan Brakhage stars as the constricted love in this spoof of pseudo-erotic card play.
1955, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m, $30
Fantasy/psycho-drama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.
1955, 16mm, color/so., 7 min., $20
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.
Award: Bronze Medal, Brussels Int'l Experimental Film Festival, 1958
1956, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $25
Recently restored by Anthology Film Archives
This films is about the illusion of existence, and the migration of human qualities through light and shadow, as are all my films of the 1950's. Poet Michal McClure and his then wife, Joanna, and poet Kenneth Rexroth's daughter, Mary, exist only as figments of black and white photography. The real story lies in the permutations of light and shade as human shapes move through them. This is probably my best effort from that period.
1957, 16mm, b&w/so, 8m, $30
Among the wanderings that began in the 1950's was the filmmaker's 3-year stint in the merchant marine. “Waterlight” is a night and day impression of the never-constant, ever-changing vast ocean and its companion the sky.
1957, 16mm, color/so., 8 min., $25
Originally shot in 1957 and edited in 1978.
The protagonist, poet Michael McClure, emerges from the all-reflection imagery of glass shop and car windows, bottles, mirrors, etc. in scenes which are also accurate portraits of both McClure and the city of San Francisco in 1957. At the same time it is a lyric and mystical film, building to a crescendo of rhythmically intercut shots of McClure's face, seemingly trapped on the glazed surface of the city. Music by William Moraldo. I don't think of this as an "early film" anymore, since it never came together until '78. Now it's tight.
1957-1978, 16mm, sepia/so, 8m, $25
One of the few remaining authentically "Beat" films, made from the inside of that particular North Beach movement. Features artists Wallace Berman and family, poets Michael McClure and Phillip Lamantia, and artist John Reed, plus the growers of peyote in southern Texas. The film begins with a North Beach portrait of John Reed, proceeds to a grail-like search (and discovery) of the sacred peyote grounds, then returns to the Berman's home in SF. A spiritual drug odyssey seeking religious epiphany, a thing which many people believed in at that time.
1958, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
A game of 9-pins played among the stars. Filmograph animation.
1960, 16mm, b&w/so., 5 min., $20
Recently restored by Anthology Film Archives
The simple contemplation of the plum tree through a window, in rich black and white.
1960, 16mm, b&w/si., 7 min., $20
A celebration of the filmmaker's daughter's birth. The blazing garden as metaphor for the cycle of life.
1960, 16mm, color/so., 8 min., $25
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.
1961, 16mm color/so., 6 min., $20
Simon Rodia, an uneducated Italian immigrant in Los Angeles built one of the most famous works of primitive art, the Watts Towers.
1963, 16mm, color/so., 4 min., $20
“Beat Era” poets, Kirby Doyle and Sharon (DiDi) Morrill, in a jazz duet of motorcycle, trumpets and foliage.
1963, 16mm, color/so., 9 min., $30
Monk meanders through a maze of Minoan bull dancers, satyrs and revelatory rainbows.
(Animation)
1964, 16mm, color/so., 8 min., $20
Famous assemblage sculptor artist, George Herms, displays drawings on butcher paper as the filmmaker's daughter plays with colors of light.
1964, 16mm color/so., 6 min., $20
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, shown over and over at anti-war Universities then. Now, so apt again.
1964, 16mm color/so., 3 min., $20
Animation. An established classic. Steel engravings form a surrealistic dream world. P. Adams Sitney has written at length on the film in his book Visionary Film. It can be shown to any adventurous audience, young or old, and has never disappointed. The theme: resurrection, rebirth, flight into higher spheres was thought to be out-moded in this century's art. Evidently not, judging from the impact of the film on viewers.
"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
Awards: First Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Milwaukee Art Center Festival; First Prize, Kent Film Festival; First Prize, Art Institute of Chicago Film Festival; Second Prize, University of Cincinnati Film Festival.
Exhibition: Swedish Film Institute; Austrian Film Museum; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pompidou Center, Paris; American TV; American Traveling Avant-Garde Exhibition.
Collections: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Anthology Film Archives; Austrian National Library.
1964, 16mm, b&w/so, 9m, $30
Animation. The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Eric Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are possible, and that we will not dissolve into a jelly if we allow ourselves to relax into them: A horseman rides through the landscape, through the town, but never arrives anywhere in particular. An acrobat swings on a rope above a canal in Venice, and is content just to swing there. Nothing threatens to disturb them. This film is a total contrast to the Kafka-like oddities of Eastern European animation.
"It is impossible not to hallucinate on your own while watching it." - Lita Eliseu, East Village Other
Awards: Fourth Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival; Special Commendation, Yale Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Austrian Film Museum; Carpenter Center, Harvard University; SF Museum of Modern Art; Pacific Film Archive.
Collection: Anthology Film Archives
1965, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"Jordan is one of the collagists and animators of film who can produce a significant vision. He is finding a way to work seriously with animation. Jordan is starting to significantly develop animation, in HAMFAT ASAR, as a fine arts mode." - Carl Linder, SF Observer
Animation. The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully molded 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.
Awards: First Prize, University of Wisconsin Film Festival; Kokosing Award, Kenyon Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pacific Film Archive; Carpenter Center, Harvard University; American Avant-garde Film Exhibition, Tokyo; Filmex, LA.
Collection: Anthology Film Archives; Australian National Library.
1965, 16mm, b&w/so, 15m, $45
A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels and geriatric clocks.
(Animation)
1965, 16mm b&w/so., 3m, $20
An "in-camera" document or journalistic writing on film, with no subsequent deletions or re-ordering. Made in 1966, it is the first partly pixilated "diary film" I am aware of.
"BIG SUR: THE LADIES is a three-minute film by Larry Jordan. 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. The movements of the camera are impregnated with such happiness that they pull you into a world of exuberance, of light, of joy of living. And here is where one could speak, if one wants, about the techniques of the Underground. For much of this joy and exuberance is transmitted to us not through the images themselves, but through the rhythms, through the movements of the camera, that is, the movements of the filmmaker as he shoots - one could say, through the rhythms of his heart. Exactly the same way as the feelings of joy or sadness are determined and transmitted to us in music: through the rhythms, through the pacing, through the timbre." - Jonas Mekas, "Why Do People Like Morbid Movies?", The New York Times
1966, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
"My own favorite of Jordan's films is THE OLD HOUSE, PASSING. It is, says Jordan, a 'ghost-film' in which 'mood predominates over plot'; in fact it may be the best ghost film ever made. I should make clear that it is not a conventional narrative; on a first viewing, it is somewhat difficult to find any clear story line. This, though, only adds to the film's sense of mystery. Rather than being given a clearly defined situation, we see character and locations recur mysteriously rather than for any verbally definable reason." - Fred Camper, The Soho Weekly News
"Larry Jordan's THE OLD HOUSE PASSING is, to me, more than just a 'great film'/'a work of art.' It is, as a matter of careful thought, the only motion picture drama I have ever seen which engenders vision, rather than cutting it back to 'sights' of minded hieroglyphs in movement and/or shifts of symbol stasis." - Stan Brakhage
"It is pure cinematic poetry. The powerful evocations of the dark forces in our lives are unfolded and displayed with absolute surety and absolute artistry. And the word for that is 'Masterpiece.'" - Robert Nelson
Collections: Anthology Film Archives; The Australian National Library.
1967, 16mm, b&w/so, 45m, $135
A foolish magician concocts a potion which doesn't do the job it's intended to. A fairy queen turns into a mortal woman and must confront the dazzlement of the world of humans. A gnome steals a princess, and a wicked queen traps them all. Who can help them? Who can untangle the web?
"A group of California people, headed by Larry Jordan, the director-writer-photographer-editor, have emerged from a forest with a sensitive, lovely work. Exquisitely photographed (in good old black-and-white), threaded by a tactful narration and soothing music, the film gracefully pantomimes the tale of a kidnapped little princess, a wandering fairy queen and a bumbling magician ....
"The picture moves simply, clearly and interestingly, projecting an ethereal spirit. At its best the film's texture and tone suggest Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and this is high praise indeed. Let's hope we can say soon that here comes Mr. Jordan again." - Howard Thompson, The New York Times
1969, 16mm, b&w/so, 70m, $135
Animation. The mystical Lady with the orbital head moves through the carnival of life in a Surreal Adventure. A classic. Show it to anyone who likes movies.
"A beauty ... a genuinely mystical exercise." - Howard Thompson, The New York Times
"OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE - perhaps Jordan's most exquisitely perfect creation - is a color collage of roccoco imagery juxtaposed with symbols of the space age. The images metamorphose, transmute, interpenetrate and otherwise change with the fluid effervescence of bubbles rising out of water, punctuated by sudden flashes of light, alarm buzzers and abrupt visual surprises. It is a mystical, jewel-like creation, like a Joseph Cornell box come to life." - Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle
"A sense of mystery and adventure. Jordan is in his own distinct way a magician." - Donald Miller, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Awards: First Prize, University of Cincinnatti Film Festival; First Prize, University of Wisconsin Film Festival; Second Prize, Kent Film Festival; Second Prize, Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; NY Film Festival; American Avant-garde Exhibition, Tokyo; Pacific Film Archive; Pompidou Center, Paris.
1969, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $45
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.
"Jordan uses a bagful of camera and editing techniques that bring multi-limbed deities into bone-rattling motion; the sacred art images are intercut with views of lotus blossoms, skies and other features of the natural landscape, which enhance the lush, sumptuous quality of the visual effects .... [S]ynchronized masterfully to a sound track of chanted mantras and ritual music." - Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle
"A monumental effort that is laced with brilliant artistry, moments of deep impact." - San Francisco Chronicle
Made possible by a Guggenheim grant to the filmmaker.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; SF Museum of Modern Art; Pacific Film Archive; Whitney Museum of American Art.
1972, 16mm, color/so, 28m, $85
Animation. A compact, full-color cut-out animation as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble. The eternal round shape, the orb - sun, moon, symbol of the whole self - balloons its inimitable and joyous course through scene after scene of celestial delight, fixing at last as the mystical globe encasing the lovers whose course it has paralleled throughout the film. People who have shown OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE over and over have now decided it's OK to book this film.
"More complex than the art work in The Yellow Submarine." - Ed Blank, Pittsburgh Press
Exhibition: Swedish Film Institute; Austrian Film Museum; Touring Program, American Federation of Arts; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pacific Film Archive; Whitney Museum of American Art; Walker Art Center.
1973, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
Animation. In many ways a more searching, and certainly a more complex film than OUR LADY OF THE SPHERE. 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.
"Pulsating lights, undulating objects, combined with a rich and full color sense." - Donald Miller, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Exhibition: Cannes Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art; Swedish Film Institute; Austrian Film Museum; SF Museum of Modern Art; Walker Art Center.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
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.
"In THE APPARITION, which is being shown at the Whitney Museum's New American Filmmakers Series, Mr. Jordan sets up a central figure to whom a dream belongs, and the figure simultaneously constructs it and dreams it. The figure is Paul, a maker of experimental films and commercials.
"Hallucination and reality shift back and forth. We see Paul experiencing his visions, telling about them afterward, and - he is a film maker, after all - setting them up.
"There is a charming openness in the way Mr. Jordan blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, and between fantasy and fraud." - Richard Eder, The New York Times
1976, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $135
Directed by Terry Ketler, produced by Larry Jordan.
I wanted more of a "how to do it film" and less a promotion-of-ideas; but there is enough concrete information about the way THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER was made for the film to be interesting and valuable to animation groups or anyone interested in my particular methods and ideas. I am shown talking, and working on THE MARINER. There are clips from THE MARINER, as well as earlier films included. The process is traced from conception to print.
1977, 16mm, b&w/so, 28m, $85
Original narration by Orson Welles; made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Animation. Using the cut-out style of animation I tried to marry the classic engravings of Gustave Dore to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through a classic narrator: Orson Welles. It's a long opium dream of the old Mariner (Welles) who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.
"The film, far from being a mere visual accompaniment to the poem, has an integrity of its own. Throughout the film, serpents, butterflies and other creatures from Jordan's earlier works such as DUO CONCERTANTES and GYMNOPEDIES appear, bearing the unmistakable signature of the artist, creating mysteries, subtleties and rich asides. These are the strokes of genius, the touch of the craftsman, which have turned old material into new, translating 19th century art into a totally new kind of masterpiece. The Mariner lives as he has never lived before." - Carmen Vigil, San Francisco Cinematheque
1977, 16mm, color/so, 42m, $125
Animation. 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.
Exhibition: The Hague Community Center; Milky Way, Amsterdam; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Pompidou Center, Paris; Walker Art Center.
1978, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
In 1965 I worked as Joseph Cornell's assistant on boxes and films. I filmed his work extensively, and as much as I could of him. (It is the only film footage that exists of Cornell.) Until 1978 I couldn't edit the film. When I finally learned it would be a kind of personal journalistic tribute to the man who taught me so much, it fell together. What you see are the close-up interiors of many Cornell boxes, some collages, and a few shots of Joseph. You hear the things he said to me (as I recall them) and the thoughts I think about it all. If you are a Cornell fan, there isn't any other film on him.
Award: First Prize, Documentary, Marin Film Festival.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY, in conjunction with Cornell retrospective; Walker Art Center; Cornell University.
Collection: Australian National Library
1978, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
Animated to the rhythms of Eric Satie's Gnossienne V. The moon and moonlight are the guiding lights of this visual interpretation, and I have kept the backgrounds in soft greens and blues. Only the cosmic tumbler, whose enigma is emphasized by his red color, breaks this pattern. Satie's music simplified and refined the imagery, made it the celestial circus I have always dreamed of. SONATA begins a new phase in my animation. I am finally getting in touch with the real poetry possible here. All works of art seem to come ready-made with their own sets of rules. And in this film only very simple movements were permitted.
Exhibition: Zagreb Int'l Animation Festival, 1980; SF Film Festival; New Animators Special, York Theater, SF; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Walker Art Center.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
Animation, also of a new order in the recent series of short works. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, again to Satie's piano music. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30" wide white card sitting on a music stand, center stage of a large auditorium or music hall, with sound from the projector piped into the big speaker system. The film is most effective this way, but can be shown normal-size also.
Exhibition: Walker Art Center; Anncey Int'l Animation Festival, France.
1980, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
This is a very different animation. A series of surreal titles are rapidly alternated with the cut-out animation movements. The titles are often simple and the words and images combine easily into an eerie flickering superimposition. But I also was interested in pressing this technique to the limit of informational overload. Sometimes the eye is lost in the flashing barrage of words and pictures. Sound would have been too much, so I left it silent. The titles are by collage artist and painter, Jess Collins.
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Walker Art Center; Cornell University.
1980, 16mm, b&w/si, 9m, $30
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.
Exhibition: Zagreb Int'l Animation Festival, 1982.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
Three picture-movements where myths of the past meet visions of the present. All three are live-image scenes and scenery worked to pre-chosen music. Dante and Virgil descended on the back of the monster Geryon into hell. I descended through levels of earthly sensuality and found - the winter season. Part 1, ADAGIO, is a nude study of a beautiful woman; I call her Psyche. And a nude man; I call him Eros.
Albinoni is one of my favorite baroque composers. I used a particularly mysterious and compelling composition of his to invoke reminiscences of the old world (gardens of Paris) welling up into the new (the arid, Mexican-like region of southern California), to combine in a personal rendition of the Psyche and Eros theme: first Psyche appears as a nude portrait study for camera, then Eros, the male erotic energy (embodied in the portrait of sculptor George Herms). It is a romantic fantasy, two portraits, and a journey between old and new. I think of the film as a way to destroy such distinctions, that is, the distinction between old and new, past and present, myth and reality.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
IN A SUMMER GARDEN explores the mystery-roots of my own passion for the world of bright blossoms, the mystical rose, the ancient gardens of Beardsley and King Arthur. In this case I chose the music of Delius - a composition whose title becomes the title of my film. While studying (and in some cases actually listening to) the music, I filmed scenes from my garden, featuring special blossoms as they appeared, or whole banks of blossoms as they matured. Thus, on one level, we see an accurate study of a flower garden's progression through a season. Color tones rise and fall, swell and recede with the music. (Delius was studying his wife's summer garden as he composed.) Into this portrait of the annual bursting forth of riotous natural color I have injected the mysterious presence of two spirits - the cat who watches it, and the woman (face never seen) who attends it: allegory and document of how it was that year in that place.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
WINTER LIGHT, filmed in the dawn hours of California winter, explores the endless permutations of light and illumination as representatives of the Demeter-Persephone myth of withdrawal of life through the winter months.
Vivaldi's winter concerto. Powerful, cold, a zinging of frost. Pale fog of violet hue rolling in masses over the hills of Sonoma. The dawn hours, the colors, the animals, and the long, lingering deceptive arising of the Divine Son (Sun) through beige and purple reflections on the mist-covered pond. (An entry to the Underworld, where Geryon descended.) Impressionistic, palleted. Opaques and translucencies responding. The veil of the ancient goddess (Demeter) whose daughter had been stolen here. The land of Hades (Pluto), his cold domain, from whence She brings back life on her return (with Her daughter) to the upper world - spring as we know it. I laid out a carefully and elaborately thought-out system of light qualities and movements to represent (in wholly natural images) the retelling of this myth, which is the heart of the Eleusinian mysteries of old. There, the daughter's name is Persephone or Kore.
1983, 16mm, color/so, 9m, $30
A culmination of five years' work. Full hand-painted cut-out animation. Totally unplanned, unrehearsed development of scenes under the camera, yet with more "continuity" than any of my previous animations, while meditating on some phase of my life. I call it an "alchemical autobiography." The film begins in a paradisiacal garden. It then proceeds to the interior of the Mosque of St. Sophia. More and more the film develops into episodes centering around one form or another of Sophia, an early Greek and Gnostic embodiment of spiritual wisdom. She is seen emanating light waves and symbolic objects. (But 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, nor do I know the meaning of the episodes. I hope that they - 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.)
"... the greatest epic animation film ever, yr wondrous SOPHIE'S PLACE ...." - Stan Brakhage
Exhibition: Museum of Modern Art, NY
1986, 16mm, color/so, 90m, $135
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. THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM attempts to engage the mind, and particularly what is unknown in the mind, rather than what has been seen and known a thousand times over.
THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM reaches farther than any of my other animations. It goes off in many directions, held together, hopefully, by the soundtrack, which itself goes off in a number of directions: strange sounds, some recognizable, others not. Some music. No voices, no silence. This is intentional. The film is a compendium, as indicated in the title - a catalog of visible possible experiences, some at normal time, some speeded up or slowed down, some continuous, others broken up.
Exhibition: Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1991; SF Cinematheque, 1991; Cineprobe, Museum of Modern Art, 1991; Anthology Film Archives, 1991; Annecy Int'l Animation Festival, 1991.
1991, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
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 prefix "bio," of course, means "life." But what I refer to specifically here is the connotation of biography. The film shows only one woman. Most biography, however, details information about a specific human being: who that person is and what he or she did when. Some of these elements occur in THE BLACK OUD. But there is a difference.
The film is truly about Joanna McClure. It follows her actual activities during the summer of 1990. She traveled in Rome and the Greek islands, saw ruins and temples, read, sometimes swam, dressed, wrote lines of poetry, sat at cafe tables, etc. She did all these things; the camera recorded them. (Is there perhaps too little information about daily lives of people?)
Through the use of H.D.'s great poem, "Hermetic Definitions," as the fictitious thoughts of Joanna, a kind of everywoman, is projected onto the screen, and it is no longer simple biography, but bio-documentary, a document of all life.
1992, 16mm, color/so, 45m, $135
The mystery and the beauty of Mexico's high desert colonial town, its churches, its abandoned silver mine, its statues and colored streets. Lines from Garcia Lorca.
1996, 16mm color/so., 8 min., $25
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). Blow guns spear exploding spheres. The timing of the animation is exquisite, existing in an atmosphere balanced between frenzy and delight.
2004 16mm color tint, sound, 6 minutes $20
Animation. Jordan has used 46 engraved Dore illustrations to IDYLLS OF THE KING as settings for his extravigantly 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. Both the black and white and the color-tint versions are equally affecting. Main themes love, death, and resurrection. Please note that there is a separate black and white version of this film.
2004 16mm 17 minutes, color, sound $55 Rental
The poet's dreams a maiden's bubbles through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion. (Animation)
2005, 16mm color/so, 5 min., $20
Ever dance the mambo with silent film stars and Jordan animation? That’s what you get with “Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass”. It’s raucus. It’s lush. It’s delirium. Here are just a few stars in the film:
Eric Von Stroheim
Greta Garbo
Gary Cooper
Buster Keaton
Lilian Gish
Mary Pickford
Lionel Barrymore
Lon Chaney
Joan Crawford
Marie Dressler
Charlie Chaplin
What more can I say?
2006, 16mm, color/sound, 15 min. $55 Rental
For a long time I have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engravings 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 blatent sounds of police sirens and old door buzzers on the sound track, while "real" and nightmare images compete for screen time.
2008, 16mm, color/so, 11 min. $35
Visions of a City,
Duo Concertantes,
Cornell 1965,
Our Lady of the Sphere,
Orb,
Moonlight Sonata and Masquerade
See film descriptions above.
1957-1985, 16mm, color/so, 50m, $65