Animation. The theme is weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings as well as tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Erik Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are pos...

The strangeness of HAMFAT ASAR is laced with carefully molded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby the filmmaker sat quietly without movin...

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" t...

A foolish magician concocts a potion which fails to do its intended job. 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 Californ...

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

The fantasy of hell from Dante Alighieri and his yearning after the Epic Poetry form of Virgil, the Latin poet. Once again, featuring the magnificent illustrations of Gustav Doré, the actual inspiration for the film. Presented on each of the seventy-six illustrated first-edition plates, a fast-mo...

Famous assemblage artist George Herms displays drawings on butcher paper while Lorna Star, the daughter of the filmmaker, 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. Apt then and apt always.

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

For the first time, Lawrence Jordan animated 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 be...

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...

Animated to the rhythms of the fifth "Gnossienne" by Erik Satie. The moon and moonlight are the guiding lights of this visual interpretation and Lawrence Jordan kept the backgrounds in soft greens and blues accordingly. Only the cosmic tumbler, whose enigma is emphasized by his red color, breaks ...

Primarily in black-and-white with touches of color, the engraved artwork was filmed on color negative in order 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...

Despite its title, this brevity is somewhat romantic. We do see the ogre, however. He inverts himself into the action throughout the film. As usual, the action is partly symbolic, partly surreal (if those two can ever be separated). Toward the end, Eadweard Muybridge still-sequences are brought t...

"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 stas...

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 escor...

The film was completed in 1956 in its present form using a Dmitri Shostakovitch track although some of the footage was photographed in the winter of 1952-1953 at Harvard University. Although Lawrence Jordan worked on other films during this time, he considers this be his first truly completed fil...

A compact, full-color cut-out animated film 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 m...

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, New York Times

The "gravity" throughout OZ seems spell-bound, shifting from heavy to almost non-existent. Most often this gives the characters, objects and animals an ability to take off, float and ignite into a sparkle of incandescent intensity. Carried aloft by John Davis' music, the cosmic and spectacularly ...

In the dada tradition: ball bearings, horses and angels dance with gears, wheels and hair brushes to a Beatles song. PINK SWINE is a sleeper in the repertoire of the many fantastic animated films of Lawrence Jordan.

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

Beat Era poets, Kirby Doyle and Sharon (DiDi) Morrill, in a kaleidoscopic phantasmagoria in the form of a jazz duet with motorcycle, trumpets and foliage.

The mystery and beauty of a high desert colonial town in Mexico, its churches, its abandoned silver mine, its statues and colored streets. [Lines from Federico García Lorca.]