CIRCUS SAVAGE Chapter XII
LAWRENCE JORDAN
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17m
At the close of the first decade of the 2000s, Lawrence Jordan wove together a vast river of image and sound from unused film material piled-up in his studio since 1952. In essence, this is his visual autobiography, including clips from strange and unusual appropriated footage, outtakes from many of his films as well as material from uncompleted projects.
Comprised solely of the final seven-hundred feet of film, the shortest chapter of CIRCUS SAVAGE concludes the three-dozen-less-two reels with an extended cacophony of sounds and sights. We open at an undisclosed race track many years ago as a horse pass to the right, then a cut to a model train as it travels to the left. An automata and other trains pass by to the audio of wildlife, interspersed with assorted and unrelated title-cards. These fabricated winter scenes segue to a negative-image of the great outdoors, evoking a railroad journey of another sort. The travelogue continues to a wildcat enclosure and the intrusion of various other animals, followed by a lone parachuter slowly descending into the frame. From there, desert scenes are accompanied by Richie Havens singing "Handsome Johnny" and, thereafter, a leisurely reappearance of Joanna McClure birdwatching and additional outtakes from the H.D. TRILOGY (1992-1994) era. Appropriately enough, the twelfth chapter—and nearly twelve-hour opus—closes in the midst of these final wanderings with the solo-piano "fantaisie" GASPARD DE LA NUIT no.1 by Maurice Ravel, inspired by the Aloysius Bertrand poem ONDINE (and his GASPARD-ian collection). Poetry manifested in soundwaves and lightwaves.
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