Lawrence Jordan

Lawrence Jordan

Born: January 1, 1934
in Denver, Colorado, USA
Known principally as a maverick spirit in the world of avant-garde American cinema, Lawrence Jordan played an important role in the late 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco art scene. Jordan has made over seventy experimental films, including a number of fanciful, filmic animations made from collaged cut outs of Victorian engravings. The animations extend dreamlike imagery of collaged landscape into a cinematic realm of transformation and free form symbolism. Jordan seeks to delve into the deep structures and Jungian connotations of the mythological images his films reference. His alchemical approach to imagery creates what he has called the “theater of the mind, which you construct. That is the Underworld... the realm of the imagination. You have to have a place to work with images.”

Jordan founded the film department of the San Francisco Art institute in 1969 and taught there for over thirty years. He made his own box assemblages in Cornell ’s lyrically evocative style since the mid-1960s. Many feature ingenious mechanical and kinetic effects. He continues to make films and box collages at his home and studio in Petaluma where he has lived since 1978.

Movies for Lawrence Jordan...

Encounters in Light
Title: Encounters in Light
Character: The Filmmaker
Released: July 31, 2020
Type: Movie
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.
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Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
Title: Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
Character: Man
Released: April 14, 2003
Type: Movie
This wacky prequel to the 1994 blockbuster goes back to the lame-brained Harry and Lloyd's days as classmates at a Rhode Island high school, where the unprincipled principal puts the pair in remedial courses as part of a scheme to fleece the school.
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Tapestry
Title: Tapestry
Character: Himself
Released: January 1, 1988
Type: Movie
TAPESTRY, part of Lawrence Jordan's "Odyssey" triptych and filmed much later in Jordan's life, is a charged record of his bachelor life after marriage and child-rearing.
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Cornell, 1965
Title: Cornell, 1965
Character: Narrator (voice)
Released: September 28, 1978
Type: Movie
Lawrence Jordan's portrait of the reclusive artist Joseph Cornell.
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Untitled Film of Geoffrey Holder's Wedding
Title: Untitled Film of Geoffrey Holder's Wedding
Released: July 7, 1955
Type: Movie
Wedding gift from Maya Deren to Geoffrey Holder; Stan Brakhage and Larry Jordan made film of wedding at Maya Deren’s invitation, told to be “as free as possible”
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The Extraordinary Child
Title: The Extraordinary Child
Released: November 12, 1954
Type: Movie
The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.
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Desistfilm
Title: Desistfilm
Released: January 1, 1954
Type: Movie
Four young men and a young woman sit in boredom. She smokes while one strums a lute, one looks at a magazine, and two fiddle with string. The door opens and in comes a young man, cigarette between his lips, a swagger on his face. The young woman laughs. As the four young men continue disconnected activities, the other two become a couple. When the four realize something has changed, first they stare at the couple who have kissed and now are dancing slowly. The four run from the house in a kind of frenzy and return to stare. The power of sex has unnerved them.
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Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection
Title: Unglassed Windows Cast a Terrible Reflection
Released: January 1, 1953
Type: Movie
An anatomy of violence. Four young men and two young women are on a drive. There's a rivalry between two guys for one of the girls. On a remote road, the car stalls. The driver hitchhikes for help. Led by the intrepid girl, the others walk toward abandoned buildings, perhaps a mining operation. One of the three guys sits and reads. The intrepid one explores the building and sees something that scares her. She screams; the two rivals and the second girl run to find her. Something she says starts a fight between her two suitors. The one reading a book walks away in disgust. After stopping the fight, the two young women follow. How can this end?