Jordan Belson. Allures + Samadhi

"Jordan Belson (1926, Chicago - 2011, San Francisco) studied painting before seeing Oskar Fischinger and the Whitney brothers' films at the Art in Cinema festival, beginning in 1946, at the San Francisco Museum, whereupon he increasingly devoted himself to the moving abstract image. His early films animated real objects (pavements in Bop-Scotch [1952]) and scroll paintings prepared like film strips with successive images (Mandala [1953]).

Between 1957 and 1959, Belson collaborated with composer Henry Jacobs on the historic Vortex Concerts, which combined the latest electronic music with moving visual abstractions projected on the dome of Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. The Vortex experience inspired Belson to abandon traditional painting and animation in favor of creating visual phenomena in something like real time, by live manipulation of pure light-- which has been the technological basis for his approximately 20 films from Allures (1961) until 2005.

The second major well-spring of Belson's mature films arose from his increasing involvement with mystical and contemplative philosophies. The mature films frequently express aspects of Indian mysticism and yoga, reflected in the titles of his masterpieces Samadhi (1967) and Chakra (1972), which render the actual visual and auditory phenomena that Belson experienced in hightened states of meditative concentration".*

The films selected for this presentation reflect these two periods in his oeuvre.

Courtesy of Center for Visual Music, Los Angeles

* Quotes by dr. William Moritz. From L'art du Mouvement 1919-1996, ed. Jean-Michel Bouhours, Cinema du Musee national d'art moderne (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1996).

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