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Jordan Belson: Films Sacred and Profane

Presented by International House Philadelphia at The Ibrahim Theater at International House

July 6, 2012

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Image: Still from Chakra by Jordan Belson (c) Jordan Belson, courtesy Center for Visual Music

Curated and introduced by Cindy Keefer of the Center for Visual Music

In memory of Jordan Belson, 1926 – 2011
Presented in Association with Center for Visual Music

Born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area, Jordan Belson trained as a painter before turning his attention to filmmaking after discovering the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Hans Richter at the seminal Art in Cinema series. Since 1947, Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself in a visionary body of work that has been called “cosmic cinema” – brimming with vibrant color, mandalas, liquid forms, and mesmerizing rhythms. Starting in 1957, Belson collaborated with sound artist Henry Jacobs on the “Vortex Concerts,” multimedia events that combined new electronic music from around the world with Belson’s visual effects projected on the interior of the sixty-five-foot dome of the California Academy of Science’s Morrison Planetarium. This program features rarely screened films including Séance (1959), new preservation prints of Momentum (1968) and Chakra (1972), and Epilogue (2005), a distillation of sixty years of visionary images synchronized to a symphonic tone poem by Rachmaninoff, and more.