“Moments chosen for nuclear annihilation… where are you going to run to?” Working in his beloved 16mm (with an acoustic blues song on the soundtrack), the filmmaker answers his own apocalyptic question with seductive snippets of a relative rocking on the porch; horses bounding in free-spirited pleasure; a shirtless, smoking hunk eyeing the camera; a young woman working out a tune on the piano; a Sunday family meal. Nothing particularly profound, mind you, unless it all vanished in a flash of heat and hydrogen. - Michael Fox
Using the cut-out animation, Lawrence Jordan married the classic engravings of Gustave Doré to the classic poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge through narrator Orson Welles. It is a long opium dream of the old mariner who wantonly killed the albatross and suffered the pains of the damned for it.
"Th...
Except for the removal of one out-of-focus shot (which the filmmaker did not feel fit into the texture of the piece), Lawrence Jordan was never able to change the footage from the way it came out of the camera. The film was never intended as an ‘in-camera’ film but it turned out to be one. An ill...
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. Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Lama, was the advisor.
"Jordan uses a bagful of camera and editing techniques that bri...