Lawrence Jordan Trailers
Encounters in Light TrailerTapestry TrailerCornell, 1965 Trailer
Known principally as a maverick spirit in the world of avant-garde American cinema, Lawrence Jordan played an important role in the late 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco art scene. Jordan has made over seventy experimental films, including a number of fanciful, filmic animations made from collaged cut outs of Victorian engravings. The animations extend dreamlike imagery of collaged landscape into a cinematic realm of transformation and free form symbolism. Jordan seeks to delve into the deep structures and Jungian connotations of the mythological images his films reference. His alchemical approach to imagery creates what he has called the “theater of the mind, which you construct. That is the Underworld... the realm of the imagination. You have to have a place to work with images.”
Jordan founded the film department of the San Francisco Art institute in 1969 and taught there for over thirty years. He made his own box assemblages in Cornell ’s lyrically evocative style since the mid-1960s. Many feature ingenious mechanical and kinetic effects. He continues to make films and box collages at his home and studio in Petaluma where he has lived since 1978.
Most Popular Lawrence Jordan Trailers
Total trailers found: 87
01 January 1976
A full production: sync-sound drama with cast, crew, color neg., and 16mm wide screen cut-off (normal projector and lens).
13 September 2017
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.
02 July 2024
We are presented on the screen with a sequence of Arcadian images, the intent of which is to raise consciousness one full octave, and to give the viewer a strong hint that a stream of brightness runs through the universe.
01 January 1953
An anatomy of violence. Four young men and two young women are on a drive. There's a rivalry between two guys for one of the girls.
01 January 1996
POSTCARD FROM SAN MIGUEL is perhaps the most mystical of all the films from Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych.
01 January 1955
Fantasy/psycho-drama of the cat, the candle and the Christmas tree.
01 January 1965
Animation. The theme is Weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings, also from tensions and gravitational limitations.
01 January 1981
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.
12 November 1954
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.
05 July 1965
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully moulded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain.
01 January 1980
Animation, also of a new order in the recent series of short works. Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form, again to Satie’s piano music.
02 March 1964
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.
01 January 1977
Orson Welles reads the poem especially for this film by Larry Jordan, which is dedicated to the late Wallace Berman, and is made possible by a grant from The National Endowment Of The Arts.
01 January 1956
Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Lawrence Jordan portrays male sexual frustration while slyly satirizing Hollywood reaction shots.
01 January 1960
A celebration of the filmmaker’s daughter’s birth. The blazing garden as a metaphor for the cycle of life.
01 January 1954
A woman reads Philip Lamantia's poem (from which the film gets its title), which evokes masculine angst as the hand acts out the scenario of the poem.
28 September 1978
Lawrence Jordan's portrait of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.
17 March 1979
"After GYMNOPEDIES, I had long wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by [Erik] Satie.
18 June 1967
A ghost story with an unstructured plot set amidst the mysteries of an old house. Mood is dominant over plot, and heightened by musical accompaniement.
01 January 1988
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.
01 January 1978
Sepia toning lends a romantic (even wistful) quality to Larry Jordan's film Visions of a City, which he shot in San Francisco in 1957 and edited in 1978.
01 October 2008
For a long time, i have wanted to construct a melodrama (animated) from the funky engraving of the 19th century which illustrated "young peoples" adventure stories.
01 June 1972
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.
01 January 1982
Part of a trio of films that also includes ADAGIO and WINTER LIGHT, IN A SUMMER GARDEN "draws much of its power from the way it is constructed and the ways it deals with images.
01 January 2018
There is a hint of an under water circus, and many of the performers are acrobats. The sea water, if that's what it is, is yellowish brown.
01 April 2010
On ancient star maps of magnificent color quality, experimental animator Lawrence Jordan takes the viewer out of this world into a world of cosmic imagination.
01 January 1978
Ancestors is a film about spiritual forefathers and mothers in a purely fanciful sense. These are classical figures, anatomical figures, fairy tale figures and romantic figures all thrown in together - all my creative root-sources, in a kind of playful tribute.
01 January 1961
Painter and collage artist, Jess (Collins) performs 41 (now lost) collages to (his) selected sound bits in the manner of a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon.
04 July 2021
Film by Lawrence Jordan, soundtrack by John Davis. Children's book illustrations intermingle with the alchemical and all kinds of animalia in Jordan's 2020 short.
31 January 2007
Two distinct idylls: one of summer, one of winter. Accompanied by appropriate music (the sonatas are not silent), each one moves through a period of time and place.
17 March 1973
A compact, full-color cut-out animation as ephemeral as the colors swimming on the surface of a soap bubble.
01 January 1993
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.
01 January 1983
Though best known for his collage films, Lawrence Jordan here makes exquisite study of the different aspects of light lilting through the early morning fog of California winter.
01 January 1966
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.
23 September 2004
The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen.
01 January 2008
Combines the Mambo and Tibetan sound effects with Jordan Animation and clips of silent film stars, including Eric Von Stroheim, Greta Garbo, Gray Cooper, Buster Keaton, Lilian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, Lon Chaney, Joan Crawford, Marie Dressier, Charlie Chaplin and others.
06 June 2011
In describing the foundations for SOLAR SIGHT, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "A question I had in mind was: what's the place of the human being in the cosmos? More and more we think about what is 'beyond.
05 September 2013
I have continued the dream-like form of disparate animated scenes, each with its own "romantic-with-an-edge" slightly surreal flavour.
25 September 1992
The Black Oud represents a subtle new direction in documentary. I have used the term 'bio-documentary' to describe this slight, though essential, difference between my film and the majority of personal or experimental documentaries made in the last decade.
01 January 1964
(Now) famous sculptor artist George Herms displays drawings on butcher paper as the filmmaker’s daughter plays with colors of light.
01 January 1966
Avant-garde short by Lawrence Jordan.
01 January 2012
In explaining the process of SOLAR SIGHT II, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "Many of the approaches to the cut-out material are the same as in part SOLAR SIGHT I, however SOLAR SIGHT II is a much different film.
01 January 2014
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.
23 March 1991
The Visible Compendium constructs bits of unnamed meanings, fragments of light. Photography is, to me, not about things, but about light.
18 November 2016
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.
06 June 2010
Where all is static motion; where music and light become one; where change and motion become one; and where the end is the beginning.
01 January 1983
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.
01 January 1965
A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels, and geriatric clocks.
07 July 1955
Wedding gift from Maya Deren to Geoffrey Holder; Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan made film of wedding�
02 December 2021
An eight-minute film by titan of avant-garde animation, Lawrence Jordan.
01 January 2005
The poet's dreams a maiden's bubbles through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.
01 January 1993
The film is simply the internal, subliminal (poetic) thoughts of an aging woman poet as she travels the world, alone, probably for the last time, thinking of a friend she has lost.
06 August 2015
The filmmaker pays homage to the two men who most influenced his initial film work: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Buñuel (surrealism in cinema).
02 December 2015
The filmmaker pays homage to the two men who most influenced his initial film work: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Buñuel (surrealism in cinema).
12 February 2019
This short piece is somewhat romantic, despite its title. We do see the ogre however. He inverts himself into the action throughout the film.
31 July 2020
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.
01 January 1960
A kinetic collage of superimposed warm, soft-colored 16mm film set to percussive jazz, Lawrence Jordan's PORTRAIT OF SHARON features beat poet Kirby Doyle on a motorcycle and Sharon "Didi" Morill, poet and onetime girlfriend of the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, blinking her big eyes and sharing her youth with the camera.
01 January 1957
"Human qualities migrate through light and shadow... Like flames and waves, the dead and the living course through this world.
11 January 1973
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.
07 July 1986
Five years in the making, Lawrence Jordan's feature-length "alchemical autobiography" Sophie's Place takes as its inspiration the story of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Sophia.
