Duo Concertantes
Directed by: Lawrence Jordan
year: 1964 9 minutes
"Larry Jordan's most delicate film..." - P. Adams Sitney
DUO CONCERTANTES has two parts, THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION and PATRICIA GIVES BIRTH TO A DREAM BY THE DOORWAY. Both PATRICIA and HAMFAT ASAR (made the following year), the two most spectacular of Lawrence Jordan's animated works, operate against the backdrop of a fixed scene. In the former, it is a back view of a lady framed in a doorwar looking out upon woods and a lake; in the latter, Jordan uses an engraving of a seacoast with cliffs. Time and a change of culture have given a surrealistic and nostalgic aura to Victorian steel engravings, as Max Ernst and several collagists between him and Jordan have known for many decades. Where Ernst slammed together radically incongruent images from such found material and thereby released the terrors of monstrosities and the sensual depth of inconceivable landscapes, Jordan has chosen to refine their delicacy and to push his images almost to the point of evanescence, a limit represented in several collages by the reductive metaphor of a film within a collage-film flickering with pire imageless light.
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
- Music / Tone Poem
Related Films
Beyond Enchantment
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(2010)
9 minutes
- Genres:
- Avant-garde
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Music / Tone Poem
Where all is static motion; where music and light become one; where change and motion become one; and where the end is the beginning.
Gymnopédies
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(1966)
6 minutes
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Music / Tone Poem
Lawrence Jordan took not only the music but the title from Erik Satie. GYMNOPEDIES is probably the most famous of Satie's musical series.
Moonlight Sonata
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(1979)
4 minutes
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Music / Tone Poem
After GYMNOPEDIES, Lawrence Jordan had wanted to animate a film specifically for a pre-selected piano piece by Erik Satie. MOONLIGHT SONATA is that film.
Carabosse
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(1980)
4 minutes
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Music / Tone Poem
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
Mostly on black space, the figures in blue perform a very compact and jewel-like opera in surreal form to Erik Satie's piano music.
Masquerade
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(1981)
4 minutes
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
- Short / Narrative
- Music / Tone Poem
In the film MASQUERADE, we enter the experience of death with respect and reverence. The clouds disperse and the scene is revealed. As with all of Lawrence Jordan's films, the narrative is implied and can be viewed in a variety of ways.
The Visible Compendium
Dir. Lawrence Jordan
(1990)
17 minutes
- Genres:
- Animation / Cut-Out
- Short / Non-Narrative
- Avant-garde / Surrealist
Lawrence Jordan's THE VISIBLE COMPENDIUM is a catalog of "possible experiences, some at normal time, some speeded up or slowed down, some continuous, others broken up."
Reviews
Quietly transcendent. Unassumingly scintillating. Just keeps getting better as it goes. Rather random, though.
If you haven't experienced the delightful neo-Victorian cutout animations of Lawrence Jordan, you've been missing out. Lovely beyond compare.
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