Alchemical
Dream Works
by
Christopher
Zimmerman
 |
| Larry Jordan Our Lady of the Sphere (1969) |
Alchemy
/alkəmē/ noun
1. The
medieval forerunner of chemistry, concerned with the transmutation of matter,
in particular with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a
universal elixir.
2.
A
seemingly magical process of transformation, creation, or combination.[1]
Larry Jordan’s meticulous and wondrous body of
work over the last seven decades could be seen as a theater of the mind, as a staging of psychic
landscapes. Jordan’s unparalleled animated
collages of 19th-century
engravings, manuscripts, and common symbols plumb the depth and mysteries of
the unconscious through transformative processes of filmic alchemy.
A master of cut-out animation, Larry Jordan—together
with mentor and visionary pioneer of the assemblage Joseph Cornell—would forge
a uniquely American Surrealism. His
experimental collage films transform familiar ‘found’ objects into Surrealist
mappings of the world of the imagination—uncanny, dream-like—constructed
through a process of free association. Mindscapes—The Alchemical Films of Larry
Jordan presents a landscape of films by this visionary filmmaker that
testifies to the powerful forces underneath and beyond the rational mind.
The Practicing Alchemist
In contrast to his contemporaries
Harry Smith and Kenneth Anger, who he refers to as ‘practicing magicians’,
Jordan thinks of himself as a ‘practicing alchemist’.[2] His
process transforms and transfigures the filmic material into tapestries of images,
symbols, and sound that seem to exist outside of time. Jordan’s alchemy, in turn, reflects back onto
us as viewers, challenging us to undergo a similar process of transformation as
we interpret the images on the screen.
The films
themselves, which resulted from an alchemical process of free association,
require a further ‘alchemical’ process of interpretation in order to construct
meaning out what we see. Mind and screen
meet. We enter the worlds of these films
as these films enter our worlds. In
resonance with Gilles Deleuze’s theorization of the ‘Brain as Screen’, can we
not see Larry Jordan’s work as literal landscapes of the mind—mindscapes?
 |
| Larry Jordan Hamfat Asar (1965) |
Mindscapes
In his The
Cinema of Poetry, P. Adams Sitney writes:
‘From very early on we can see interwoven
traces of three fundamental temporal articulations of Jordan’s art: a foregrounding
of cinematic time in the rhythm of montage and camera movement, an evocation of
timelessness, and an obsession with transfiguration.’[3]
To achieve this, Jordan employs a static
background taken from engravings and manuscripts (suggesting another time and another world) upon
which collaged figures and symbols dance across the screen in a constant and continual process of transformation. Discussing his use of the fixed background,
Jordan explains that:
It's not a real interior of a palace;
it's an architectural fantasy. The squares and the perspective lines are highly
accentuated. It's very geometrical. It's almost like being in a geometric
fantasy, and so as far as I can determine what it's saying is that there is an
area of the mind you can go to where anything
goes. You can think anything without censorship. Anything can happen without it
being reasonable or logical, that
the rule, strict rules of physics do not apply, although they are in evidence.[4]
Jordan’s alchemical
films—these mindscapes—liberate the mind and imagination from the dictates of
reason, logic, and the categories of time and space. Not ‘real interiors of a palace’, are these
‘geometric fantasies’ not the interiors of our minds? It is up to us to interpret these images, which
exist and persist outside of a rational framework. They bubble up, in moments of illumination,
out of a tenuous and mysterious netherworld, and only take on meaning and
significance in the act of viewing, in the act of interpretation. Without censorship (repression), anything can
be thought… Is this not precisely the ‘royal road to the unconscious’?
 |
| Larry Jordan Duo Concertantes (1961-1964) |
In his Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund
Freud’s distinction between the manifest and latent content of dreams requires interpretation
to work out the meaning and significance of the dream. Freud writes that, ‘…my theory is not based
on a consideration of the manifest content of dreams but refers to the thoughts
which are shown by the work of interpretation to lie behind dreams. We must make a contrast between the manifest and the latent content of dreams.’[5] Masking the reality underneath appearances, the
fragmentary images of the manifest content are not subject to time, space,
causal necessity, narrative logic.
Through complex
processes of the displacement and distortion of memory traces in the
unconscious, which are not immediately accessible to the ego (the conscious
system), the manifest content represents appearances. But, behind these appearances is the latent
content. The only way to arrive at the
latent content, the reality behind the appearances, is to engage in the act of
interpretation. The manifest content
must be worked through, placed within the particular context of the individual
dreamer’s mind and its history, in order to unearth what lies behind and underneath.
Contrary to his
contemporaries, Freud insists that there is no codified system for dream
interpretation. It is not a matter of
translating the dream image using a fixed key-code of symbols; dream
interpretation is not a method of decoding.
Rather, the meaning and significance of the dream symbol are revealed through
the process of working-through, through the process of analysis… And the fact that there is a secret meaning
in dreams (latent content) must be demonstrated anew with each particular dream
by analysis. We can only make sense of
our dreams by placing the memory traces and images, that is, what exists beyond
the logic of the rational mind, into an ordered, coherent narrative. We bring that which has been repressed into
consciousness via language.
 |
| Larry Jordan The Visible Compendium (1990) |
Italo Calvino wrote
that: ‘No one key opens all the
locks’. Resisting our tendency to
presuppose the existence of one authoritative source of meaning, Larry Jordan
freely admits that he does not know the meaning of the images that he puts
together. The existence of an ultimate meaning
residing in the authorial vision closes off interpretive possibilities and is,
in the end, a construction of power. In
order to liberate both his images and our interaction with them, Jordan adopts the
Surrealist strategy of free association in creating the symbolic systems of his
collage-films.
The Surrealists
appropriated the method of free association at the heart of Freud’s research
into hypnosis in order to open the creative process to forces more powerful
than the individual rational ego. Each
of Jordan’s films calls for a different strategy to ‘induce’ free association,
to achieve a state of mind unfettered by the dictates of reason. Since the most powerful forces in the mind
are unconscious, that is, only available when the censorship of the
preconscious is relaxed (dreams, hypnosis, jokes, linguistic slips), Jordan and
the Surrealists forced inspiration by bringing the artist’s mind into a state
of pure imagination, thus unleashing unconscious drives. Jordan explains that: ‘The reason I do that is because I believe that's my
entry into the unconscious. Free
association is a way of getting past the rational mind into the unconscious, and if I freely
associate—if I use some free-association images, I can bypass this. I mistrust too much ego and too much will in putting
images together…’[6] The rational mind is necessarily reductive,
and Jordan’s mistrust is justified by the fact that conscious planning and
pre-conceived notions typically remain on a surface level. We are left with the manifest content without
penetrating into the unconscious realm to reveal the deeper meaning of the ‘latent
content’.
With his associative
process, Jordan does not chart a predetermined path; rather, he finds the path
as he goes. A true experimentalist,
Jordan never knows the end-result in advance.
The material itself shapes his alchemical research and explorations, not
the other way around, and Jordan’s process and results of his process defy facile
absorption and comprehension. Like
Freud’s dream-work, the meaning of Jordan’s films emerges out of interpretive
engagement on behalf of the viewers’ minds.
Just as Freud
rejects the notion that dream imagery and symbols can be ‘decoded’ using one
key, Jordan’s conception of his alchemy also resists a codified system. He explains that: ‘I don’t think the practicing alchemists ever
had a codified system. Every one of them was off on their own kick. They had imagery that was like a common
language, and I use that language… I’ve
been manipulating old imagery with new technology as part of my alchemy.’[7] Both Freud’s theorization of the dream-work
(the process by which the unconscious displaces and alters the manifest content
of dreams in order to conceal its latent content) and Larry Jordan’s filmic
alchemy require interpretation to decipher and reveal meaning below the surface.
Reminiscent of the
wax tablet underneath the celluloid upon which a stylus imprints traces in
Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’, Jordan’s films are palimpsests existing outside
of time and space, achieved through an alchemy of mysticism, symbols, visions,
dreams, poetic imagination, reverie, memory…
 |
| Larry Jordan Cornell, 1965 (1965-1979) |
Dream Symbols
Collage,
particularly in Jordan’s hands, is a symbolic system, in which images are
ripped from their original context and placed within a new system of relations,
which, in turn, brings out new meaning.
This new meaning, however, was already latent within the images, and by
placing images where they are not expected (according to reason), the viewer must
then re-evaluate the conventional in order to give the assemblage new meaning. Replete with common symbols, the power of
Jordan’s animated collages stems from their ‘universality’ emerging out of the
shared reservoir that is Jung’s collective unconscious.
Adamant that a
symbol radiates significance rather then standing in for something else, Jordan
proclaims that:
A symbol by
definition can't be explained away; it just sits there and continues to radiate significance to the unconscious… A symbol
just is there. And it evokes – the idea is that a symbol will evoke whatever
the viewer is predisposed to have evoked by that symbol. That's the power of
it. And that's what I want the films
and the boxes to do – to interact with the predispositions and the psychological filters of the viewer
and come alive to that viewer only at the moment of viewing, and not to
transfer some idea that I have in my mind to the viewer. I'm not interested in
doing that. I'm interested in the viewer interacting with the piece or with the
film, and whatever meanings that viewer makes
out of that experience are the valid ones, not ones that I planted in there. No Western Union message sending here.[8]
For Jordan, the
symbol is not a metaphor; rather, it simply is.
Each symbol evokes different meanings in each individual. Each symbol resonates differently depending
on what the individual brings to the interaction. At the same time, symbols are symbols by
virtue of the fact that we collectively recognize them as such. The power of the symbol is that it evokes
very different meanings in us, yet, at the same time, these different meanings
are all rooted in a shared reservoir of cultural, mythological, and ideological
drives, desires, and identity formations.
What is crucial here is that Jordan intends his films to ‘come alive’ in
the mind of the viewer at the time of viewing.
The film really only exists when a viewer is interacting with its images
and working through the ‘manifest content’ in order to arrive at a deeper
interpretation of the ‘latent content’.
 |
| Larry Jordan The Visible Compendium (1990) |
Transformation / Transfiguration
Jordan’s alchemy, in
fact, is a double process. Through free
association, he transfigures his cut-out materials—the materials of the
film—into collages, into symbolic systems.
This alchemical transformation of the material into the film is repeated
as our minds construct (or re-create) meaning out of the film itself. Our interaction with the film, as is the case
with dream interpretation, brings the fragmentary into the coordinates of
narrative logic. Just as we interpret
our dreams by piecing together the disparate images and symbols to make sense
of them, we have to piece together Jordan’s images and symbols into an
inter-related system that takes on significance for us.
But, ultimately, is
it not the case that this double alchemy is also mirrored in Jordan’s obsession
with transformation? His meticulous and
absolutely patient animation process is itself a process of transformation, and
as we try to make sense of the transformations of the images, we are ourselves
transformed in the act of looking, in the act of interpretation. Jordan’s trance vision extends the alchemical
process from the material of the film to a potential transformation of the
‘soul’.
For Freud,
interpreting our dreams is also a transformative process through which we
reveal something about our selves; it serves a therapeutic function. We are transformed through the interpretive
process of unveiling, revealing, analyzing, self-analysis. He writes, ‘When the work of interpretation
has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish.’[9] Larry Jordan’s collage films fulfill the wish
of astonishment and revelation, the wish to transcend the conventional, to
reach for the impossible, the desire to participate in the larger, more
powerful mind (transcendental ego?) flowing out of archaic well-springs.
Psychoanalysis as
alchemy… Alchemy as cinema… Cinema as Dream Factory… Cinema as mind…
© 2018 Christopher
Zimmerman
This essay was published in the 2018 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema in conjunction with the screening program: Mindscapes--The Alchemical Films of Larry Jordan.
[3] P. Adams Sitney; The Cinema of Poetry; chapter
6—‘Lawrence Jordan’s Magical Instructions’; Oxford University Press; New York;
2015; p. 140.
[4] Oral
history interview with Larry Jordan; Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution;
December 19, 1995-July 30, 1996.
[5] Sigmund Freud; The Interpretation
of Dreams; trans. & ed. James Strachey; Avon Books; 1998; p.
168.
[6] Oral
history interview with Larry Jordan; Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution; December 19, 1995-July 30, 1996.
[8] Oral
history interview with Larry Jordan; Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution; December 19, 1995-July 30, 1996
[9] Sigmund Freud; The Interpretation
of Dreams; trans. & ed. James Strachey; Avon Books; 1998; p. 154.
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