In a timeless world of surreal possibilities, the conjunctions and strange meetings of humans, animals and improbable objects coalesce, linger and move on to the truly timeless and ethereal music of John Davis.

There are no hidden meanings in these conjunctions except those that form in the mind...

Where all is static motion, where music and light become one, where change and motion become one and where the end is the beginning. Black-and-white cut-out animation with touches of color. Ladies of the past encounter science and natural phenomena.

An established classic. Steel engravings form a surrealistic dream-world. It can be shown to any adventurous audience, young or old, and has never disappointed. The theme (resurrection, rebirth, flight into higher spheres) was thought to be outmoded in the art of this century. Evidently not, judg...

A series of vaudeville acts inserted between the lines of reality, meant to demonstrate the ephemerality of all things.

The walls come tumbling down. The wheels come off the wagon: thunder, lightning, explosive meditations. Everything seems to be happening all at once. Then, before you can catch your breath, it is over.

An exquisite animation which lifts off and proceeds with the delicacy of a soap bubble. Conceived as a tiny interlude between longer films: a chance to catch one’s breath after and before more aggressive works; a "time out" period for the mind to float effortlessly and free of gravity.

In the THE FORTY-AND-ONE NIGHTS, painter and collage artist Jess (Collins) performs his "Didactic Nickelodeon" of forty-one (now lost) collages to (his) selected sound bits in the manner of a turn-of-the-century cinematic jukebox.

Animation. The theme is weightlessness. Objects and characters are cut loose from habitual meanings as well as tensions and gravitational limitations. A lyric Erik Satie track accompanies the film. Such a portrait seems necessary from time to time to remind us that equilibrium and harmony are pos...

The strangeness of HAMFAT ASAR is laced with carefully molded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby the filmmaker sat quietly without movin...

From a central pivotal position, the camera eye (in this case, the hard and inflexible eye of Minerva) looks out upon twelve passing scenes. None of the scenes are necessarily associated with specific signs of the Zodiac. Lawrence Jordan instead assembled twelve of his collages and passed them in...

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 ...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...