Except for the removal of one out-of-focus shot (which the filmmaker did not feel fit into the texture of the piece), Lawrence Jordan was never able to change the footage from the way it came out of the camera. The film was never intended as an ‘in-camera’ film but it turned out to be one. An ill...

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 bri...

A simple contemplation of the outside through a window.

Divided into two: springtime in the garden (in the first) while showers fall (in the second).

The title is perhaps a misnomer and might better be something like CELESTIAL NINE-PINS as it is about planets and stars and old star maps being knocked around the sky by gigantic forces called the "Gods" once upon a time. Simply, a Lawrence Jordan fantasy of an alchemical romance. Many of the woo...

A question that the filmmaker had in his mind: what is the place of the human being in the cosmos? More and more we think about what is "beyond" although less and less is art concerned. The reason why is unknown. Though the question seemed somewhat grandiose, he approached it quite simply. Having...

Basking in time. Many of the approaches to the cut-out material are the same as in first part, however the second SOLAR SIGHT is a much different film. It is more meditative. It has a somewhat slower pace. Lawrence Jordan tried to let the cut-outs float more gracefully. Again, John Davis' music f...

In the third SOLAR SIGHT, completing the trilogy, Lawrence Jordan continues 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...

Fully hand-painted cut-out animation and the culmination of five years' work. Totally unplanned, unrehearsed development of scenes under the camera (yet with more "continuity" than any of the previous Lawrence Jordan films) this "alchemical autobiography" meditates on a few phase of the life of t...

"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." Michael McClure and Joanna McClure along with the poet Kenneth Rexroth's daughter Mary make their way through SPECTRE MYSTAGOGIC.

STAR OF DAY 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 ...

In opposition to conventional cinema, where emotional manipulation is the norm, Joseph Cornell's movies and "goofy newsreels" are highly suggestive enigmatic collages. His fractured narratives defy easy interpretation, even with those employed by the French surrealists of the 1920s. His elliptica...

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

The film 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"), whereby t...

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

One of the few remaining authentically "Beat" films, made from the inside of that particular North Beach movement. Features artists Wallace Berman and family, artist John Reed and poets Michael McClure and Phillip Lamantia along with the growers of peyote in southern Texas. The film begins with a...

Ostensibly, a pataphysical card game played on the body of a nude woman. This bizarre concept (according to the director) could only come from a "very young, inexperienced would-be filmmaker." Lawrence Jordan shot the film in one night in the basement apartment of the small Victorian house rented...

Fantasy / psychodrama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.
[Filmed in San Francisco at an apartment a street or so below McAllister off Franklin. The cat was named Tin Sing.]

An assortment of unnamed meanings. Fragments of light. Photography, to Jordan, is 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 mi...

Originally photographed in 1957 but edited in 1978. The protagonist, poet Michael McClure, emerges from the all-reflection imagery of glass shop and car windows, bottles, mirrors and so forth, in scenes which are also accurate portraits of both McClure and the city of San Francisco of the late-19...

Among the wanderings that began in the 1950s was a three-year stint by the filmmaker in the merchant marine. WATERLIGHT is a night-and-day impression of the never-constant, ever-changing vast ocean and its companion, the sky.