“The Visible Compendium”
in the viewer. I mean them to be entirely open to the viewer’s own interpretation.)”
The disc is rounded out with two 17m shorts, “The Visible Compendium” (1990) and “Blue Skies Beyond the Looking Glass” (2006). The first is a collage of sounds (such as whalesong) as well as images, employing very sophisticated visual tech- niques that contrast paradoxically with the quaint- ness, just as Jordan’s personal originality arises paradoxically out of others’ images and music. A continual theme in his films is looking, as people and things look at other people and things, with or without visual aids. Another theme is perfor- mance, sometimes explicitly connected to the cir- cus. Another theme is pleasure itself. And just to remind us that Jordan isn’t completely escap- ing the contemporary, there’s an eyeblink joke where a little man cries “Saddam!” over images of American gunboats.
The second short interweaves Jordan’s typical hallucinations with footage of silent film stars such as Lon Chaney in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, Charles Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in THE KID, Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore in THE NEW YORK HAT, and other films less readily iden- tifiable. Technically, not all of them are from silents, since images of Eric von Stroheim were culled from
James Cruze’s early talkie THE GREAT GABBO. The mambo music here is more jaunty and con- temporary sounding than ever, though still passé. Disc 4 contains documentaries and non-ani- mation. It makes sense to discover in “Cornell, 1965” (1979, 9m) that Jordan worked for a while with Joseph Cornell, for he too appropriated and recontextualized lost images and objects, finding poignant meaning in their bygone qualities. This film consists of a few almost random minutes of footage, including poignant moments of the unsuspecting artist seen from an attic window. “The Sacred Art of Tibet” (1972, 28m) cata- logues the various manifestations and meanings of the Buddha, as explained by a narrator to give Jordan a reason to play with ancient imagery. He uses color filters, movements, frantic transitions, and multi-layered images. Jordan reports that a lama described it as an acid trip, and it does rather resemble the climax of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It’s impossible to convey the simple beauty of “Visions of a City” (1979), eight minutes of sepia footage of city streets (San Francisco in 1957) as reflected or refracted in things: windows, chrome bumpers, bottles. One young man (poet Michael McClure) is followed for several shots, but our views are always distorted and glancing. The lovely modal
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