Lawrence Jordan (born 1934) is an American independent filmmaker [1] who is most widely known for his animated collage films. [2] He was a founding member of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative and the Camera Obscura Film Society.
Lawrence Jordan (born 1934) is an American independent filmmaker [1] who is most widely known for his animated collage films. [2] He was a founding member of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative and the Camera Obscura Film Society.
Jordan was born in 1934 in Denver, Colorado. [3] He attended South High School with Stan Brakhage. [4] He attended Harvard University from 1951 to 1953, where he was active in the film society. [3]
Jordan moved to Central City, where he put on plays with friends from high school. Both he and Brakhage began making films during this period, with Jordan appearing in Brakhage's Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection and Desistfilm and Brakhage appearing in Jordan's The One Romantic Venture of Edward and Trumpit. [4] While the two were in New York, Jordan met artist Joseph Cornell at his show at the Stable Gallery. He described Cornell's work as "like an anchor" for him, aligning with his own "sensibility of delicate magic". [3] [5]
In 1955, Jordan settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. He appeared as Faust in Robert Duncan's play Faust Foutu, and Jess introduced him to collage novels by Max Ernst, which became a major influence on his filmmaking. He taught Bruce Conner how to edit films, and in 1957 the two founded the Camera Obscura Film Society, which was active until 1962. Jordan made several voyages as a Merchant Marine during this period. [4]
During the 1960s, Jordan was one of the founding members of the Canyon Cinema Cooperative. [4] He was inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead when creating his 1969 film Our Lady of the Sphere , now one of his best-known works. [3] In 1970 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to make Sacred Art of Tibet. [6]
In 2008 Facets Multi-Media released the Lawrence Jordan Album, a DVD collection with 25 of his films. [4] The Camera Obscura Film Society was re-established in 2015, and Jordan's films are screened as part of its annual report in Petaluma, California. [7]
Our Lady of the Sphere was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2010. [8] [9]
A camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole or lens at one side through which an image is projected onto a wall or table opposite the hole. The image of lensless camera obscuras is also referred to as "pinhole image".
A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film by American artist Bruce Conner. It combines pieces of found footage taken from various sources such as newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, all set to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.
James Stanley Brakhage was an American filmmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film.
Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and film-maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
Jan Švankmajer is a Czech film director, animator, writer, playwright and artist. He draws and makes free graphics, collage, ceramics, tactile objects and assemblages. In the early 1960s, he explored informel, which later became an important part of the visual form of his animated films. He is a leading representative of late Czech surrealism. In his film work, he created an unmistakable and quite specific style, determined primarily by a compulsively unorthodox combination of externally disparate elements. The anti-artistic nature of this process, based on collage or assemblage, functions as a meaning-making factor. The author himself claims that the intersubjective communication between him and the viewer works only through evoked associations, and his films fulfil their subversive mission only when, even in the most fantastic moments, they look like a record of reality. Some of the works he created together with his wife Eva Švankmajerová.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
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The Film-Makers' Cooperative is an artist-run, non-profit organization founded in 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams, and other filmmakers, for the distribution, education, and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media.
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American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) is justifiably best known for his boxes which constitute a singular contribution to the Surrealist canon and to the art of assemblage. However, he also pursued experimental film-making as an amateur beginning in the 1930s. Cornell was the principal pioneer of collage films in a purely artistic sense and, although the introduction of his films into the public forum was relatively late compared to when they were made, his work as a filmmaker has been widely influential.
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