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...
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...
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
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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,...
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 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...
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.
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...
A repository of fashion, pleasure and instruction, HARPER'S BAZAR first appeared in 1867 as a weekly publication showcasing European fashion for prosperous women on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Lawrence Jordan uses these nascent materials (before the magazine expanded to an additional "A" to...
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...
Combines the Mambo and Tibetan sound effects with Jordan Animation and clips of silent film stars, including Eric Von Stroheim, Greta Garbo, Gray Cooper, Buster Keaton, Lilian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressier, Charlie Chaplin and others.
