Welcome

This site is dedicated to the work of Lawrence C Jordan,
artist and film maker in the San Francisco Bay Area

Known principally as a maverick spirit in the world of avant-garde American cinema, Lawrence Jordan played an important role in the late 1950s and early 1960s San Francisco art scene. Jordan has made over seventy experimental films, including a number of fanciful, filmic animations made from collaged cut outs of Victorian engravings. The animations extend dreamlike imagery of collaged landscape into a cinematic realm of transformation and free form symbolism. Jordan seeks to delve into the deep structures and Jungian connotations of the mythological images his films reference. His alchemical approach to imagery creates what he has called the “theater of the mind, which you construct. That is the Underworld... the realm of the imagination. You have to have a place to work with images.”

Jordan founded the film department of the San Francisco Art institute in 1969 and taught there for over thirty years. He made his own box assemblages in Cornell ’s lyrically evocative style since the mid-1960s. Many feature ingenious mechanical and kinetic effects. He continues to make films and box collages at his home and studio in Petaluma where he has lived since 1978.

You are invited to explore this site, where you will find, information on Lawrence Jordan's background, previous film festivals that spaned across the globe, and publications where his work as both an artist and a film maker are featured.

New from the Studio


Most Recent Film

Ogre's Garden
color, 3 minutes
2019