Jordan Belson

Influences

Relation to San Francisco Museum of Art - all from Stein/Keefer:

some of Belson’s major influences were films and kinetic light art exhibited at SFMOMA (then the San Francisco Museum of Art) in the 1940s–60s.

He was first a painter, until he attended the seminal Art in Cinema series at the museum from 1946–53. Art in Cinema exposed the San Francisco cinema community to European avant-garde films and new American experimental films. It was here that many young artists first saw films by Oskar Fischinger, the Whitney Brothers, the European surrealists, and the French avant-garde. Belson especially appreciated Fischinger’s films (calling him “one of my heroes”); the work of Norman McLaren; and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921–25). Belson made two short animated films in 1947–48, shown in later Art in Cinema programs

In 1953 Belson attended Fischinger’s performance of his Lumigraph (a mechanical color-light performance instrument) at the museum. The Lumigraph was performed in pitch darkness, and Fischinger created what he called “fantastic color plays” with spontaneous movements of colored light dancing to accompanying music. Belson was struck by the simple elegance and the mysterious soft, glowing images. Similarly, Belson later saw one of Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia color-light machines exhibited at SFMA, which became an influence on his later work.

Vortex Concerts

Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, California. With Henry Jacobs. Ca. 1957-60. Zinman writes:

Belson produced one of the earliest expanded cinema projects, the Vortex Concerts, at California Academy of Science’s Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco. From May 1957 to 1959, roughly 35 of these Vortex Concerts took place over five series.

On music and sound system (Zinman):

Jacobs would curate an eclectic musical program, including compositions by Stockhausen and Ussachevsky as well as selections of Balinese and Afro-Cuban tunes, which would be pumped through 36 loudspeakers arranged around the room.

Equipment (Zinman):

CVM’s Cindy Keefer, who has written the definitive account of the series, writes that Belson, meanwhile, operated up to 30 different projection devices that displayed on the planetarium’s 65-foot dome. His mix of intensely layered real-time imagery comprised slide projectors, a kaleidoscope, rotating and zoom projectors, various prisms, a flicker machine, a spiral generator, four interference pattern projectors, 16mm projectors, and the planetarium’s sophisticated starfield projector. This last item, called the Academy Projector, was a unique device capable of projecting a realistic field of nearly 4,000 stars.

Phenomenology (Zinman):

Belson and Jacobs sought to disrupt the traditional gestalt of theater- or film-going by eliminating the physical and perceptual space between audience and stage/screen, in order that Vortex spectators received, or, in the phenomenological language of its program notes, were “reached” by, an overall display that is “living,” present-tense, and bodily experiential.

Perkins writes:

The concerts used “strobes, star projectors, rotational sky projectors, kaleidoscope projectors, and four special dome-projectors for interference patterns.”(Youngblood: 359) Belson created original films for the concerts; imagery by Hy Hirsh and James Whitney was also used.(Youngblood: 359)

Quock writes:

abstract visuals created by filmmaker Jordan Belson, operating up to 30 different slide projectors, kaleidoscopes, strobes, zooms, and Moiré pattern projectors, producing a sound-and-light environment unlike anything seen before

Vortex was presented in five short runs through 1959, and even went outside the U.S. to Belgium and Canada. Ultimately, though, while audiences and critics liked it, the museum administration decided that Vortex attracted the “wrong kind of crowd”—beatniks and other people who were more interested in art than in science.

Allures

From Stein/Keefer:

In October 1959 Belson and Jacobs presented a “concert of electronic music and non-objective film” called Vortex Presents at the SFMA. This was a very different, single-screen event. Belson screened early versions of films he was working on, including one which became Allures, plus films by others. Only one evening of Vortex Presents occurred; though it was planned as a series, the audience reaction was disappointing. According to Belson, they came expecting a multiple projector planetarium show, but saw instead a film screening.

The Vortex Concerts were crucial to Belson’s transition to a new style of filmmaking — he stopped using traditional animation techniques and began working with pure real-time light sources.

From Perkins:

Belson’s work on the concerts provided the raw materials for two films: Seance (1959) and Allures (1961). [...] Allures is an abstract montage of spirals, collapsing kaleidoscopes, stroboscopic patterns, geometric grids, and spinning shapes resembling atoms. Over time, his style became more organic and ethereal, reflecting such diverse influences as Eastern philosophies, outer space exploration, and psychedelic drugs.

Optical bench

Perkins writes:

It is known that part of his toolkit included a custom-built optical bench with rotating tables, variable-speed motors, and lights of varying intensity. (Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co. ( New York, 1960), 158)

Zinman writes:

He was careful to distinguish his work from animation, for instance—even though his earliest films were made via traditional animation methods—insisting, “I don’t use liquids or models. I use mechanical and optical effects; and instead of using an animating table, I call my setup an optical bench.” [...] Belson’s primary means of image-making was a purposefully rudimentary, handmade apparatus, a cobbled-together array of a “plywood frame around an old X-ray stand with rotating tables, variable speed motors, and variable intensity lights.”(paraphrasing Youngblood it seems?)

Séance (1959), for example, provides one of the first cinematic examples of a flicker effect, predating the work of both Peter Kubelka and Tony Conrad. For Light (1973), he introduced cascades of flickering and undulating particles that had not appeared in previous films.

Cycles

Zinman writes:

Belson’s willingness to use myriad media to achieve his vision is also evident in his collaboration with video artist Stephen Beck. Made for the National Center for Experiments in Television, Cycles (1974) is a fascinating, intermedial conjoining of the two men’s respective techniques. Rather than using video to mark a rupture with film or television, Belson and Beck wanted to make a moving-image work that combined the best qualities of all three media forms. In a press release for the film, Belson states, “Technically it draws together film and video in a totally convincing manner . . . fusing them in an amalgam that overcomes any distinction between the two.” The 10-minute piece thus brought together 16mm film with Beck’s Direct Video Synthesizer imagery via a proprietary process Beck referred to as “editation.” Beck also composed the soundtrack to the film, which is made of one sequence repeated 12 times, with both artists contributing variations on each pass.

As with many of Belson’s and Beck’s other works, the film carried a metaphysical inspiration. Specifically, Cycles is based on Sri Yukteswar’s The Holy Science, published in 1974, which contains ruminations on the circular patterns of human spiritual development. As Cycles begins, a figure appears, reaching with palms upward—an image that gives way to Belson’s signature flaming mandalas. Light particles swirl toward the heavens, and the viewer sees patterns of what look to be revolving eyes, with retinas dilating and contracting. A brief image of falling bodies turns out to be footage of skydivers, followed quickly by footage of molten lava. The second cycle of the film finds Beck overlaying images, providing a grid of dots, and cascading descending electronic swirls with his video synthesizer. Beck changes the color combinations of the cycle and superimposes shooting stars and snippets of Belson’s representational imagery, including San Francisco’s Transamerica pyramid skyscraper. At the end of Cycles, the initial figure reappears, slowly raising arms out to her sides in a repeated motion that imitates flapping wings. This psychedelic Shiva appears as creator, sustainer, and destroyer. At the very end of the film, a white circle slowly recedes into a blue ether. Cycles thus simultaneously embodies a paean to transformation and change, yet holds fast to the idea of an eternal return.

In mainstream

Perkins:

Excerpts from his film Samadhi were used Gerry Anderson’s film Journey To The Other Side of the Sun (1969).

Donald Cammell’s bizarre sci-fi film Demon Seed (1977). [...] Here, Belson is credited as providing “Special Proteus Monitor Footage.” This is an elaborate way of saying that footage from films such as Allures and Samadhi were used as the Proteus 4 interface.

Belson concluded his commercial collaborations with Phillip Kaufmann’s film The Right Stuff (1983). [...] Belson was involved from the pre-production phase. He created brand new material. For example, his imagery shown as the first glimpse at the galaxy by a human being. It is also featured prominently during John Glenn’s first orbital flight around the Earth. He created the imagery of the “space fireflies” or frost particles that Glenn saw as he orbited the planet. For The Right Stuff’s “fireflies” sequence, Kaufman intercut medium close-up shots of a bewildered Glenn (played by Ed Harris) surrounded by Belson’s light flecks with scenes of aborigines singing and dancing around a sparking fire. The camera follows the blaze’s embers as they lift into the night air. The resulting sequence creates the impression that the primitive ritual being enacted on terra firma is aiding Glenn’s journey in the heavens.

Zinman writes:

Belson shot over 20,000 feet of footage for The Right Stuff—enough for a feature film—of which roughly three minutes were shown in the finished work. Belson was tasked with creating images of pilot Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier, the Earth, and starfields. He was also asked to recreate the mysterious shimmering “fireflies” that John Glenn reported seeing outside the cockpit of his Apollo spacecraft. (Not entirely coincidentally, Belson’s 1964 film Re-Entry had been inspired by astronaut Glenn’s post-orbit return to earth in February of 1962, and its soundtrack used snippets of Glenn’s radio communications.)

Discourse

Zinman writes:

He claimed, “I first have to see the images somewhere, within or without or somewhere. I mean, I don’t make them up.” At another juncture, Belson said that Samadhi “is intended to be a real documentary representation, as accurately as it was possible to make, of a real place and a real visual phenomenon that I perceived—just as I am looking at you right now.”

Belson also marshaled a number of systems of esoteric knowledge—Eastern religion, alchemy, Jungian psychology, and intoxication—to imbue those abstractions with meaning beyond the kinetic play of their surface beauty.

References

• Gregory Zinman (2011): "RE-ENTRY: Thoughts on Jordan Belson: 1926-2011". Brooklyn Rail: December 2011-January 2012 [1]
• Gene Youngblood (1971): Expanded Cinema, P. Dutton & Co
• Rodney Perkins (2011): "JORDAN BELSON: VISUALIZING INNER AND OUTER SPACE". Spectacular Optical: November 1, 2011 - [2]
• Stein, Suzanne (2010): "Cindy Keefer on Jordan Belson, Cosmic Cinema, and the San Francisco Museum of Art". Open Space: October 12, 2010 [3]
• 1992–94 interview with Scott MacDonald - referred in Stein 2010
• Bing Quock (2019): "Theater of the Stars" in Universe Update: November 19, 2019. [4]