Landscapes of the Mind: The Films of Larry Jordan
For film fans, box set DVDs are great holiday gifts, but it’s often hard to find collections that will actually surprise as well as delight. Frankly, there’s just not a lot off of the beaten path. If you know any animation buffs, though, you might want to check out the four-disk “Landscapes of the Mind: The Films of Larry Jordan” — in this era of CGI swagger, Jordan’s sometimes dark, sometimes funny and always clever cut-out work might open up some new worlds from the past. Leastwise, art film animation is not the highest profile these days — kid-oriented storytelling is still the standard.
Jordan’s work offers a look into a whole other way to view animation — rather than something merely to delight or divert, it can also exist as moving art.
Straddling a consistent line between elegance and absurdity “Duo Concertantes” sets the tone for his work. Jordan plays around with circular constructs and swirling objects — juxtaposing them with lonely searchers beset by their two-dimensional but highly mobile imaginations — they seem to grapple with serious creative malaise, but an egg with butterfly wings reveals their innermost lurkings as mostly silly despite the calm and solemn soundtrack.
“Gymnopdies” offers more of the same and is equally alluring — the music of Eric Satie gives the piece a gentleness that undercuts the wackiness of so much of the imagery creating mystery from mischievous tomfoolery, as so much of Jordan’s work does.
These are abstractions plain and simple, and Jordan reveals the beauty in flying bottles and bouncing eggs, a mad world where object are filled with life even as the humans stand still.
In “Our Lady of the Sphere” Jordan employs superimposed images to great effect, combing them with washes of color and jarring sound effects, some downright intrusive and proving that he doesn’t merely exist to lull you into a dream Jordan wants to shake you up a bit and his use of circus imagery may well provide a fruitful comparison to the energy behind his animation.
