John Davis

An eight-minute film by titan of avant-garde animation, Lawrence Jordan.

Film by Lawrence Jordan, soundtrack by John Davis. Children's book illustrations intermingle with the alchemical and all kinds of animalia in Jordan's 2020 short.

A new and original collage film by Lawrence Jordan.

This is a classing Jordan animation, primarily in B/W, with touches of color. Actually, the engraved art work was film on color negative, so 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 scenes, in the usual Jordan manner, follow the surreal principle of placing objects and people where the ought not to be, and making movements that in the waking world are impossible. Each scene is a kind of drama from another world.

HARBOUR is a 16mm film focusing on the English Fascination with the Pacific Northwest. It evaluates ecological simulation and historic recreation to find in Landscape a stage for the enactment of the Other. In the 19th century English aristocrats where especially fascinated with the large evergreens of the Pacific Coast. Entrepreneurs and naturalists began importing spectacular trees, such as the California Redwood, throughout the United Kingdom. This importation of fauna was part of a circuit of appropriation through recreation; where the English simulated, in garden and greenhouse, the ecology of colonial landholdings while exporting English culture and architecture to said colonial locales.

I have continued the dream-like form of disparate animated scenes, each with its own "romantic-with-an-edge" slightly surreal flavour. Scenes are sometimes run-on, sometimes separated by brief periods of darkness to relax, as in breathing, the viewing eye. There are no fancy superimpositions now, nor excessive visual trickery, only a comparatively straight forward presentation of the improbable images, which have formed themselves in my improbable mind.

In describing the foundations for SOLAR SIGHT, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "A question I had in mind was: what's the place of the human being in the cosmos? More and more we think about what is 'beyond.' Less and less is art concerned. I don't know why. The question seems a bit grandiose but I approached it quite simply. I have never worked with color photography as primary background to cut-out animation before. I was surprised that the result was so powerful (helped by John Davis' very resonant music). It was liberating to release human figures into an apperception of suggested space, along with the primordial enigma of the revolving sphere."

On ancient star maps of magnificent color quality, experimental animator Lawrence Jordan takes the viewer out of this world into a world of cosmic imagination.—Canyon Cinema

Appropriated television images and music accompany excerpts from a sound effects CD, all seeking connections between nationalism, television, and Voltaire’s satire Candide.

Hand processed & solarized Super8 film projected live to improvised music at the On Land Music Festival, Swedish American Hall, San Francisco

Hand processed & solarized Super8 film projected live to improvised music at the On Land Music Festival, Swedish American Hall, San Francisco