Lawrence Jordan

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Wedding gift from Maya Deren to Geoffrey Holder; Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan made film of wedding at Maya Deren’s invitation, told to be “as free as possible”

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? Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.

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.

"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."

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.

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. —Canyon Cinema

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Against the coastline of the Big Sur country the camera catches swiftly shifting fragments of the nude women at the baths, playing the guitar, cutting the hair, sleeping. The camera movement is used to slightly smear the images onto the film emulsion in a manner parallel with the use of broad different medium from music or painting.

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

"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film. It was totally designed for the 'Gnossienne V' and the movements of the animation are timed to the overall rhythms as well as the specific beats of the music." - Lawrence Jordan

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

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

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.

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

Two distinct idylls: one of summer, one of winter. Accompanied by appropriate music (the sonatas are not silent), each one moves through a period of time and place. Summer takes place in my first primarily annual garden. Joanna McClure is seen moving among the brilliant annual flower colors. Winter is a misty, mood-filled exploration of the Sonoma County hills and small lakes. The time is somewhere around 1985 and is a true document of a part of what was happening in my life at that time (Canyon Cinema)

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.

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.

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.