THE RED BOOK is an elliptical, pictographic animated film that uses flat, painted figures and collage elements in both two and three-dimensional settings to explore the realms of memory, language and identity from the point-of-view of a woman amnesiac. The film suggests the ways in which language...

REIGN OF THE DOG: A RE-VISIONIST HISTORY animates allegorical and documentary images, maps and text to explore and deconstruct the history of the conquest of the Americas. The canine spin of the film derives from the Spanish fighting dogs introduced and first used against native resistance by Col...

“Moments chosen for nuclear annihilation… where are you going to run to?” Working in his beloved 16mm (with an acoustic blues song on the soundtrack), the filmmaker answers his own apocalyptic question with seductive snippets of a relative rocking on the porch; horses bounding in free-spirited pl...

In 1894, a young Frenchman named Pierre Louys, a Greek scholar, published a volume of prose poems, titled SONGS OF BILITIS, Bilitis being an imaginary Greek poet of his own concoction.

"One woman envelops her self in White wool. Another covers her self with flowers, with green leaves, and with g...

Rivers run red, planes hover above the water, ships travel in darkness and towers loom and topple. Disaster seems imminent as the hunters prepare to shoot. The body is a soft target.

REVERSE SHADOW draws on a range of sources, from target-practice games for children, brochures of WWII war planes...

A pictorial accompaniment in abstract forms, RHYTHM IN LIGHT is a pioneer effort in a new (circa mid-1930s) art form. It is a modern artist's impression of what goes on in the mind while listening to music.

Mary Ellen Bute used Melville Webber's experience with making cardboard models and with p...

The realms of childhood, war and loss echo through RICKY. Double-vision illuminates (and simultaneously obfuscates) what can be remembered, lost or retrieved. A found-sound recording forms the spine of the film... a scratched audio-letter from father to son.

"Multiple pasts come alive in Geiser’...

Using the cut-out animation, Lawrence Jordan married the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through narrator Orson Welles. It is a long opium dream of the old mariner who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.

"Th...

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...

The principal issues are the manner and persistence of the sociological collective unconscious are forwarded through time by way of the surviving generations which survive as personal contributions to the collective unconscious.

"SAVING THE PROOF is a complex transformation of an ordinary action: a woman walking. The rhythm of her gait and the pulsating, repetitive sounds counterpoint with alternating images of her transversing city streets, passing windows and fences, descending stairs. As the images repeat and vary wit...

The collaboration between two masters offers an abstract interpretation evocative of the untamed forces of nature. Stan Brakhage's film loops are transformed by Phil Solomon's lighting and printing into a prismatic flush of radiance. [Presented sans soundtrack, as intended.]

A simple contemplation of the outside through a window.

A short, poetic meditation on music and meaning in cinema. "Aurally iconographic" music fragments have been decomposed, then re-composed into loops and patterns and then combined with eclectically chosen imagery shot mostly in the western United States. The result is both a reflection of the arti...

SISYPHUS is a brief adaptation of the myth, illustrating the struggles of a man trying to push a boulder up a hill. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

An elliptical meditation on the body, illness, landscape and time. In SILENT SISTER, the body is turned out, invaded, examined. Using medical illustrations, charts, photographs of abandoned hospitals, miniatures and photographs of pre-suburban Los Angeles (which was a haven for the chronically il...

A documentary-short twofer in roughly equal parts, NO.1 is a full exploration of springtime in the backyard garden of Lawrence Jordan's home in Petaluma (with poet Joanna McClure occasionally passing amongst the scenery). NO.2 displays the mild winter down the road of the Sonoma County landscape ...

The hard-edged SKYSCRAPER SYMPHONY stands in contrast to other New York scenic newsreels produced throughout the 1920s. Robert Florey's camera looks straight up the domineering concrete behemoths in skewed perspectives that attempt to emulate musical forms. — Bruce Posner

"The most fantastic eff...

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...

"Mistakes are a gift to begin to imagine." - Stéphane Mallarmé

In SOME MISTAKES I HAVE MADE, Janis Crystal Lipzin re-imagines almost fifty years of Super-8mm, 8mm, 16mm and half-inch video outtakes, experiments, accidents, processing errors and unplanned occurrences calling attention to the cons...