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.]

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...

A simple contemplation of the outside through a window.

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 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.