‘Our Lady of the Sphere’: Lawrence Jordan’s surreal sci-fi
During the 1960s and the ’70s, American cinema was undergoing a massive period of transition due to the emergence of the New Hollywood movement. Exciting young auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola were determined to disrupt the conversation, creating challenging masterpieces in the process. Parallel to these highly visible shifts, the landscape of avant-garde cinema was experiencing the proliferation of fascinating outputs from artists like Lawrence Jordan.
Jordan, who worked alongside other pioneers like Stan Brakhage, created an interesting body of work within the domain of animation through his singular collage films. As someone who was deeply inspired by the unique artistic challenges that the American avant-garde tackled to push the boundaries of the cinematic medium, Jordan moved past the frequent criticisms of “self-indulgence” to explore the possibilities of a new kind of cinema.
In a conversation with Canyon Cinema, Jordan explained: “Art is elitist because all this political stuff is not high art. It’s propaganda. So what you have is people making art for art’s sake. It’s elitist. Let’s don’t avoid it. It is. When Adam Sitney came to lecture at the Art Institute, someone said, ‘These films are very self-indulgent.’ That is the definition of American avant-garde film. Indulgence in self, let’s don’t avoid it. It’s people exploring themselves.”
He added: “That’s what my work is about. My interface with the inner world is animation – that’s my inner world. My interface with the outer world is my personal poetic documentary, as I call it. I taught a class called ‘Personal Poetic Documentary’. It goes back quite a ways: New York in the ’50s, the work of Helen Levitt [the photographer] on the street. It’s a tradition where the artist goes out with a camera and interfaces with the real world. Or the camera turns inward, and you’re exploring your unconscious. So yes, the films are self-indulgent because they indulge in the self.”
One of the most self-indulgent (and consequently, the most interesting) additions to Jordan’s filmography is called Our Lady of the Sphere. Made in the late 1960s, it’s an indecipherable spectacle that features cutout animation to create a strange universe, one that is populated by bizarre characters who embark on mysterious journeys. It’s overstimulating in a way that simultaneously imitates and subverts the psychological manipulations of contemporary mass media apparatuses.
Incorporating a hybrid framework that borrows from both science fiction as well as period pieces, Our Lady of the Sphere is an anachronistic oddity that doesn’t exist within our traditional understandings of time and space. Interestingly, instead of making audiences aware of the disparity between our reality and the one that is projected on the screen, Jordan’s experimental work pulls us into this weird world whose logical foundations are too dynamic to keep track of.
Watch the film below.
