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.

A series of surreal titles are rapidly alternated with cut-out animation. The titles are often simple and the words and images combine easily into an eerie flickering superimposition. Lawrence Jordan was interested in pressing this technique to the limit of informational overload. Sometimes the e...

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...

For the first time, Lawrence Jordan animated 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 be...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

The poet dreams the bubbles of a maiden through edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.

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.]

A simple contemplation of the outside through a window.

Divided into two: springtime in the garden (in the first) while showers fall (in the second).

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...