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Belson has made reference to the hallucinatory quality of his films, and he associates this form of imagery with interior vision that corresponds to the inward spiritual journey the mind can achieve through meditation. In Belson’s words, “the hallucinatory aspect of imagery is certainly inherent in my work and in the ideas relevant to my work.” In a program note that accompanies Meditation (1971), Belson states, “by diving deep through your spiritual eye you will see into the fourth dimension, aglow with the wonders of the inner world. It is hard to get there, but how beautiful it is!”

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In the same program note he goes on to describe some of the visual imagery he has experienced in meditation: “I saw a shining ocean, endless, living, blissful. From all sides luminous waves, with a roaring sound, rushed toward me, engulfed and drowned me; I lost all awareness of outward things.” – Leah Hendriks, Offscreen.com

113MB | 5m 33s | 720×540 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A9CEFB58F9DC3CC/Meditation.1971.DVDRip.x264.mkv

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The post Jordan Belson – Meditation (1972) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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“In Re-entry he successfully synthesizes the Yogic and the cosmological elements in his art for the first time by forcefully abstracting and playing down both of them…” P. Adams Sitney

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Re-Entry is considered by many to be Belson’s masterwork. Completed in 1964 with a grant from the Ford Foundation, it is simultaneously a film on the theme of mystic reincarnation and actual spacecraft reentry into the earth’s atmosphere. Also, as Belson says, “It was my reentry into filmmaking because I’d given up completely after Allures. Mostly for financial reasons. But also out of general dismay at the experimental film scene. There was no audience, no distribution, there was just no future in it at that time.”

Re-Entry is chiefly informed by two specific sources: John Glenn’s first space trip, and the philosophical concept of the Bardo, as set forth in the ancient Bardo Thodol or so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, a fundamental work of Mahayana Buddhism. According to Jung, Bardo existence is rather like a state of limbo, symbolically described as an intermediate state of forty-nine days between death and rebirth. The Bardo is divided into three states: the first, called Chikhai Bardo, describes the psychic happenings at the moment of death; the second, or Chonyid Bardo, deals with the dream-state that supervenes immediately after death, and with what are called karmic illusions; the third part, or Sidpa Bardo, concerns the onset of the birth instinct and of prenatal events.

With imagery of the highest eloquence, Belson aligns the three stages of the Bardo with the three stages of space flight: leaving the earth’s atmosphere (death), moving through deep space (karmic illusions), and reentry into the earth’s atmosphere (rebirth). The film, says Belson, “shows a little more than human beings are supposed to see.” It begins with a rumbling thunderous drone (blast-off, perhaps). In a black void we see centripetal, or imploding, blue-pink gaseous forms barely visible as they rush inward and vanish. The sound fades, as though we have left acoustical space. After a moment of silence, the next sound is wholly unearthly: a twittering electrical pitch as vague clouds of red and yellow gases shift across the screen amorphously. Suddenly with a spiraling high-pitched whine we see a gigantic solar prominence (one of two stock-footage, live-action sequences) lashing out into space, changing from blue to purple to white to red. Now blinding white flashes, as though we’re passing the sun, and suddenly we are into a shower of descending white sparks that become squadrons of geometrical modules moving up and out from the bottom of the frame, warping and shifting to each side of center as they near the top.

“The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson”, Gene Youngblood

https://nitro.download/view/0403C6160B840F9/Re-entry_(Belson,_1964).mkv

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The post Jordan Belson – Re-entry (1964) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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Notable film theorist Gene Youngblood has this to say about the “Cosmic Cinema” of Jordan Belson in his classic book “Expanded Cinema”:

“Certain phenomena manage to touch a realm of our consciousness so seldom reached that when it is awakened we are shocked and profoundly moved. It’s an experience of self-realization as much as an encounter with the external world. The cosmic films of Jordan Belson possess this rare and enigmatic power.
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“The essence of cinema is precisely ‘dynamic movement of form and color,’ and their relation to sound. In this respect Belson is the purest of all filmmakers. With few exceptions his work is ‘abstract.’ Like the films of Len Lye, Hans Richter, Oskar Fischinger, and the Whitneys, it is concrete. Although a wide variety of meaning inevitably is abstracted from them, and although they do hold quite specific implications for Belson personally, the films remain concrete, objective experiences of kinaesthetic ad optical dynamism. They are at once the ultimate use of visual imagery to communicate abstract concepts, and the purest of experiential confrontations between subject and object.”

Furthermore, he calls Samadhi a “Documentary on a Human Soul.”

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/DDCAFFE88DBDEB0/Samadhi_%28Belson%2C_1967%29.avi

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The post Jordan Belson – Samadhi (1967) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Originally a widely-exhibited painter, Jordan Belson turned to filmmaking in 1947 with crude animations drawn on cards, which he subsequently destroyed. He returned to painting for four years and in 1952 resumed film work with a series that blended cinema and painting through the use of animated scrolls. The four films produced in the period 1952-53 were Mambo, Caravan, Mandala, and Bop Scotch. From 1957-59 he worked with Henry Jacobs as visual director of the Vortex Concerts at Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. Simultaneously he produced three more animated films, Flight (1958), Raga (1959), and Seance (1959).

Allures, completed in 1961, found Belson moving away from single-frame animation toward continuous real-time photography. It is the earliest of his works that he still considers relevant enough to discuss. He describes Allures as a “mathematically precise” film on the theme of cosmogenesis—Teilhard de Chardin’s term intended to replace cosmology and to indicate that the universe is not a static phenomenon but a process of becoming, of attaining new levels of existence and organization. However, Belson adds: “It relates more to human physical perceptions than my other films. It’s a trip backwards along the senses into the interior of the being. It fixes your gaze, physically holds your attention.”

“I think of Allures,” said Belson, “as a combination of molecular structures and astronomical events mixed with subconscious and subjective phenomena—all happening simultaneously. The beginning is almost purely sensual, the end perhaps totally nonmaterial. It seems to move from matter to spirit in some way. Allures was the first film to really open up spatially. Oskar Fischinger had been experimenting with spatial dimensions but Allures seemed to be outer space rather than earth space. Of course you see the finished film, carefully calculated to give you a specific impression. In fact it took a year and a half to make, pieced together in thousands of different ways, and the final product is only five minutes long.”

“Allures actually developed out of images I was working with in the Vortex Concerts. Up until that time my films had been pretty much rapid-fire. They were animated and there was no real pacing—just one sustained frenetic pace. After working with some very sophisticated equipment at Vortex I learned the effectiveness of something as simple as fading in and out very slowly. But it was all still very impersonal. There’s nothing really personal in the images of Allures.”

Excerpted from Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema

http://www.nitroflare.com/view/72A9C7E6A489063/Allures_%28Jordan_Belson_-_1961%29.avi

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The post Jordan Belson – Allures (1961) first appeared on Cinema of the World.