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.