Genres: Animation

A culmination of five years of work. Full hand-painted cut-out animation. Totally unplanned, unrehearsed development of scenes under the camera, yet with more ‘continuity’ than any of my previous animations, while meditating on some phase of my life. I call it an ‘alchemical autobiography.’ The film begins in a paradisiacal garden. It then proceeds to the interior of the Mosque of St. Sophia. More and more the film develops into episodes centering around one form or another of Sophia, an early Greek and Gnostic embodiment of spiritual wisdom. She is seen emanating light waves and symbolic objects. (But I must…

The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully molded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death – the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante’s Purgatorio, de Chirico’s stitched plain. A moving single picture. Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power…

In many ways a more searching, and certainly a more complex film than “Our Lady of the Sphere”. 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. Gradually a female guide emerges and escorts the young man into an antechamber to another (and possibly higher) world.

The scene is set in front of a French chateau. The camera chases improbable incidents across the screen. Many are constructed out of one of Jordan’s favourite engravings illustrators: Poyet. Duels occur on a tight rope. Blow guns spear exploding spheres. The timing of the animation is exquisite, existing in an atmosphere balanced between frenzy and delight.

The Poet dreams a maiden’s bubbles thru edifices of forest and eclectic contagion.

For the first time I am animating hand-painted engraved cut-outs on a full colour 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 flower. But Harlequin cannot escape death. The blue world engulfs him. (LJ)

Jordan has used 46 engraved Dore illustrations to Idylls of the King as settings for his extravagantly romantix saga. As Enid, the protagonist, is seen in a vast array of scenes from deep forests to castle keeps, her champion is sometimes with her, sometimes away fighting archetypal foes. She dies and through the magic of Gustav Mahler’s resurrection symphony lives again.

“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. Like part 2 of “Duo Concertantes,” it’s a moving single picture, now doubled. (LJ)

A dance of eclectic objects. A play of demented dolls, wheels and geriatric clocks.

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. Ideally, the film should be projected on a 30″ wide white card sitting on a music stand, center stage of a large auditorium or music hall, with sound from the projector piped into the big speaker system. The film is most effective this way, but can be shown normal-size also.