Jordan Belson

By way of a pure Visual Music experience, the Hirshhorn Museum (Smithsonian Institution) commissioned a major new work from abstract film artist Jordan Belson, who distilled 60 years of visionary sound and images into a twelve minute videofilm.

Experimental film exploring the 'transcendent potential of abstraction'.

A lyric, poetic, and visionary trip through outer and inner space. Beautiful and profound, spiritual and sensual, speaks the language of the soul.

Produced from Mystic Fire this film sums up 25 years of Jordan Belson's work by combining excerpts from his classic films with more recent work. This contains also the complete works Northern Lights (1985) and Thought Forms (1987)

Produced from Mystic Fire this film sums up 25 years of Jordan Belson's work by combining excerpts from his classic films with more recent work. This contains also the complete works Northern Lights (1985) and Thought Forms (1987)

The film contains images that are galaxy like. The colors change fluidly and fade and change into each other. A strange technique is used in this film that is not seen in many other films. This image is one that contains images on the top of the screen moving in one direction and images at the bottom of the screen that are moving in the opposite direction. It gives the impression that forces are pulling in opposite directions even though it is a single frame.

The film contains colors that combine and flow into others. Snow-like objects can also be seen falling over the screen. Although when Belson made the film he did not intend to capture or recreate the aurora borealis, Belson soon realized when he was done making the film that the film did just that. For that reason Belson gave named the film "Northern Lights." After finishing the film, Belson saw footage of the aurora borealis and realized just how close he came to capturing what the northern lights actually look like.

The first 12 minutes would later be released as "Fountain of Dreams"

A bold synchronization to the transcendental music of Franz Liszt.

This rarely-screened work, evoking distant planetary landscapes, is listed by the Center for Visual Music as one of Belson’s unfinished and/or unreleased films.

Several versions of Quartet were found in filmmaker Jordan Belson’s studio after his death, none completed with music.

Also called Pisces, this rarely-screened work is part of Belson’s Synchronicity Suite along with Apollo’s Lyre, Seapeace, and Eleusis/Crotons. It is listed by the Center for Visual Music as one of Belson’s unfinished and/or unreleased films.

Short experimental film by Jordan Belson

Music of the Spheres returns to Belson's galactic imagery in a kaleidoscopic journey through space and time with the technological help of an optical printer.

Video Weavings is a link between the modern (video) and the ancient (weaving) technologies. Video Weavings are based on poetic mathematical rhymes, or algorithms, visualized in real time on the warp and weft of video's horizontal and vertical scanning electron beams, color phosphors, plasma cells, and LCD pixels.

Abstract computer animation set to autoharp solo music composed and performed by Jordan Belson

Cycles brings together 16mm film with Stephen Beck’s Direct Video Synthesizer imagery via a proprietary process Beck referred to as “editation.” Beck also composed the soundtrack to the film, which is made of one sequence repeated 12 times, with both artists contributing variations on each pass.

Directed by Jordan Belson.

"In Chakra, I was able to transfer the traditional order of the chakras into a film, starting with the first (lower) chakra and working up to the seventh (top) chakra…" - Jordan Belson

An abstract experimental short film from Jordan Belson.

In fluid sequence the birth of a world depicted as a bio-astronomical event.

The shifting, abstract color imagery of Jordan Belson's "Cosmos," which unfurls to electronic sound, is attributed in the program notes to the artist's insight from experience with drugs and yoga. - The New York Times

"Momentum is Belson's most serene and gentle film since Allures. This treatment of the sun as an almost dreamlike hallucinatory experience is both surprising and curiously realistic." -Gene Youngblood

Samadhi is both mystical and mysterious, an incredible fusion of movement, sound and colour. Belson notes the influence of his study and practice of Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism on the creation of Samadhi. The film is inspired by the principles of yogic meditation: the movement of consciousness towards samadhi (union of subject and object), the fusion of atma (breath and mind), a state which reveals the divine force of kundalini, a bright white light we discover at the end of Samadhi. The Tibetan Book of The Dead is the inspiration behind Belson’s use of colour in Samadhi, corresponding to descriptions of the elements of Earth, Fire, Air and Water in the book. —Sophie Pinchetti, The Third Eye

". ..As though you were approaching earth as a god, from cosmic consciousness. You see the same things but with completely different meaning."

"In Re-entry he successfully synthesizes the Yogic and the cosmological elements in his art for the first time by forcefully abstracting and playing down both of them..." P. Adams Sitney

Filmmaker Jordan Belson stated this was simply an unfinished project representing the zeitgeist of this time, rather than a finished film.

Allures is a spectacular sequence of moving figures and points, a film which reaches out to the cosmic and the spiritual, where the spatial dimension becomes transcendental.

High Voltage is constructed from footage James Whitney contributed to Belson for use in one of his Vortex concerts.

One of Jordan Belson's presentation reels used in the Vortex Concerts.

Séance provides one of the first cinematic examples of a flicker effect.

A hand animated film that is a precursor for Belson’s later work

A short film which explores the last day in the lives of six different people.

A vibrant animation by Patricia Marx

Short film by Patricia Marx.

Scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images.

An early film by Jordan Belson from 1952. "[Belson's] early films animated real objects (pavements in Bop Scotch [1952]) and scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images (Mandala [1953]). Belson subsequently withdrew these films from circulation as imperfect and primitive, but they already reflect his refined plastic sensibility, fine color sense, and superb sense of dynamic structure. They also foreshadow his more accomplished expressions of mystical concepts, Bop Scotch seeming to reveal a hidden soul and life-force in "inanimate" objects."

Experimental short by Jordan Belson.

A Jordan Belson film.

In the early 1950s, Jordan Belson made a hand-drawn animated commercial for the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle. He disliked the music they selected for the commercial, and didn't keep a copy with sound. The ad screened in local movie theatres. This silent film print is in the collection of Center for Visual Music.

Experimental short by Jordan Belson.