major city with an adventurous film repertory or museum program.
Jordan was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1934 and became friends with Brakhage in high school. Attending Harvard, he was drawn to the Surreal- ists and became active in the university’s film so- ciety, discovering the works of Jean Cocteau and Sergei Eisenstein. Then he worked for 10 years with Joseph Cornell, whose boxes salvage objects and artworks by bygone eras and re-apply them in new personal constructions. All of these influences are at work in Jordan’s films. Like Czech artist Karel Zeman (THE FABU- LOUS WORLD OF JULES VERNE), Jordan at first seems like the missing link between the collages of Max Ernst and Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python. He doesn’t always make cut-out animations, though he’s most famous for that, and he uses engravings and prints of the 19th century or earlier. Sometimes one recognizes the work of certain artists—eg., William Hogarth, William Blake, J.M. Whistler, Maxfield Parrish. He manipu- lates these “classical” images in ways intended to
tickle an archetypal frisson in the viewers, or at least have us collaborate in the artist’s serene dreams.
The first disc shows the development of Jordan’s style as he adds one element, then an- other, to his basic aesthetic framework and works out the recurrences of his obsessions. Images are often recycled from film to film, such as the lady with the sphere for a head (it looks like a crystal ball), so that repetition and endless transforma- tion become the key themes. By the way, there are liner notes for all the films, though some descriptions are more helpful than others. The first two works, “Duo Concertantes” (1964, 9m) and “Gymnopédies” (1966, 5m), present the images against music in a way that emphasizes film as a musical and surreal form, and yet a clas- sical form, as well—as opposed, that is, to a “logi- cal” dramatic or narrative form, notwithstanding the literary connotations of some of the images. The backgrounds are static while various objects move in the foreground, always floating and trans- forming. Especially popular are eggs, which
“Duo Concertantes”
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