The Poet
Encounters in Light is the poetic documentation of two artists, friends, and lovers. The film eschews any biographical structure and instead looks at the ways these two artists are bound by time and light. Lawrence Jordan and Joanna McClure have extensive bodies of work between them. The film interweaves Joanna’s poetry, Lawrence’s films, personal interviews, and emotive imagery to produce a sensory engagement with a long lasting friendship and artistic practice. An understanding of mortality is ever present and the film let’s that feeling permeate throughout. How does one relate to years of love, friendship, and art? How does it resonate in the present moment? In the film, there is a sense of boundlessness and understanding that indeed, time dissolves all boundaries until there is only the possibility of light.
The film is simply the internal, subliminal (poetic) thoughts of an aging woman poet as she travels the world, alone, probably for the last time, thinking of a friend she has lost. Finally, she returns home to write ("write or die"). These story elements are all included in the last long poem of H.D. when she was in her 80s. - Lawrence Jordan
The Grove is the second part of Lawrence Jordan's H.D. Trilogy. It continues what began with THE BLACK OUD (again featuring Joanna McClure as the catalyst) and concludes in STAR OF DAY.
The Black Oud represents a subtle new direction in documentary. I have used the term 'bio-documentary' to describe this slight, though essential, difference between my film and the majority of personal or experimental documentaries made in the last decade.
