Lawrence Jordan

The Grove is the second part of Lawrence Jordan's H.D. Trilogy. It continues what began with THE BLACK OUD (again featuring Joanna McClure as the catalyst) and concludes in STAR OF DAY.

"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."

Jordan’s imagery is exquisite and eloquent, concentrating on simple, repeated use of particularly poetic symbols and figures, a conglomerative effect of old Gustave Dore drawings, 19th century whatnot memorabilia, all fused to a totally aware perception. —Lita Eliseu, East Village Other

Encounters in Light is the poetic documentation of two artists, friends, and lovers. The film eschews any biographical structure and instead looks at the ways these two artists are bound by time and light. Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure have extensive bodies of work between them. The film interweaves Joanna’s poetry, Lawrence’s films, personal interviews, and emotive imagery to produce a sensory engagement with a long lasting friendship and artistic practice. An understanding of mortality is ever present and the film let’s that feeling permeate throughout. How does one relate to years of love, friendship, and art? How does it resonate in the present moment? In the film, there is a sense of boundlessness and understanding that indeed, time dissolves all boundaries until there is only the possibility of light.

One of Lawrence Jordan's earliest animated films, PINK SWINE is an energetic and playful mix of various animation styles. Described as "an anti-art dada collage film," this free-form short presents cut-out images animated across old photos (a style picked up by Terry Gilliam a few years later) and found objects that dance to the beat of the rock-and-roll soundtrack. He produced this short during a summer spent with Joseph Cornell and Jordan edited the film entirely in camera, making the upbeat visual rhythm of this delightful lark even more impressive. –Sean Axmaker

This is a classing Jordan animation, primarily in B/W, with touches of color. Actually, the engraved art work was film on color negative, so 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 scenes, in the usual Jordan manner, follow the surreal principle of placing objects and people where the ought not to be, and making movements that in the waking world are impossible. Each scene is a kind of drama from another world.

Against the coastline of the Big Sur country the camera catches swiftly shifting fragments of the nude women at the baths, playing the guitar, cutting the hair, sleeping. The camera movement is used to slightly smear the images onto the film emulsion in a manner parallel with the use of broad different medium from music or painting.

The film, an animation, 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", wherein there is a hop-scotch of Time Travel! In which the viewer moves among various 'times', partially drawn entirely from imagination, partially from allusion to specific visual historic and pre-historic periods. It is not a straight-line progression, rather a flipping back and forth through glimpses of various ages, carried along by the surreal antics of its objects and characters.

A 'found-footage' film, original too shrunk to print on 16mm, it was made as one of four films for a project called GRAVITY SPELLS, an album of film and new music by John Davis, my collaborator in sound. The title derives from a title in the footage: THESE DRIVING DEMONS START YOUNG, and proceeds to show soap box derby races. I made a soap box racer and drove it in the official derby when I was about nine years old. The footage goes on to show various race cars, races, collisions, road cars racing and strange mobile contraptions, including rocket cars and exploding motorcycles. And of course mad drivers. All in the 1920s.

A compact, full-color cut-out animation 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 mystical globe encasing the lovers whose course it has paralleled throughout the film.

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

Fantasy/psycho-drama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.

A series of vaudeville acts inserted in images of reality, meant to demonstrate the ephemeral nature of all things.

Animation. The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Eric Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are possible, and that we will not dissolve into a jelly if we allow ourselves to relax into them: A horseman rides through the landscape, through the town, but never arrives anywhere in particular. An acrobat swings on a rope above a canal in Venice, and is content just to swing there. Nothing threatens to disturb them. This film is a total contrast to the Kafka-like oddities of Eastern European animation. —Canyon Cinema

TAPESTRY, part of Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych and filmed much later in Jordan's life, is a charged record of his bachelor life after marriage and child-rearing.

Subtitled “Eros in Psyche” and set to a composition by Tomaso Albinoni, Lawrence Jordan’s rapturous live action short contemplates two nude figures in California idyll. They remain physically separated but Jordan’s spellbinding cutting and tactile camerawork suggest a loosening of inhibition. Parisian fountains and classical statues signal the deep cultural bedrock for the filmmaker’s ostensibly freewheeling portraiture.

For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full-color background. The film is mood-filled: A duel scene in a snowy forest, obviously the morning after a masquerade ball. Harlequin lies dying, while Red Indian walks away with the wings of victory. The woman between them appears, cat-masked. The mask dissolves away. Her spirit passes into the face of the sun upon the sun upon the sun flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him.

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.

The wanderings (and Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych) begin in the late 1950s when the filmmaker joined the U.S. Merchant Marines and sailed through stormy and serene weather to the Orient. WATER LIGHT is an impression of that far wandering.

"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film. It was totally designed for the 'Gnossienne V' and the movements of the animation are timed to the overall rhythms as well as the specific beats of the music." - Lawrence Jordan