The Cosmic Cinema of Jordan Belson

Abstract

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 lms of Iordan Belson possess this rare and enigmatic power. Basic to this enigma is the disconcerting fact that Belson’s work seems to reside equally in the physical and metaphysical. Any discussion of his cinema becomes immediately subjective and symbolic, as we shall soon see. Yet the undeniable fact of their concrete nature cannot be stressed too frequently. Piet Mondrian: “In plastic art, reality can be expressed only through the equilibrium of dynamic movement of form and color. Pure means aflord the most effective way of attaining this.”14 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 lmmakers. With few exceptions his work is not “abstract.” Like the lms 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 specic implications for Belson personally, the lms remain concrete, objective experiences of kinaesthetic and 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. In their amorphous, gaseous, cloudlike imagery it is color, not line, which denes the forms that ebb and ow across the frame with uncanny impact. It is this stunning emotional force that lifts