The Lawrence Jordan Album

This four-disc collection gathers together the life's work of Lawrence Jordan, whose half-century of animated and live-action films are rich in imagination. Jordan's visual style—particularly his animated shorts featuring cutouts of 19th-century engravings—clearly inspired Monty Python troupe member Terry Gilliam, although Jordan himself never overindulged in surrealistic extremes. Instead, Jordan's animated films offer a distinctive dreamlike element that pushes emotional buttons with raw and often reckless daring. The most notable piece here is Jordan's interpretation of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” with Orson Welles providing the appropriately dramatic narration to the filmmaker's eerie, Gustave Dore-inspired visuals for Coleridge's landmark poem. “Visions of a City,” started in 1957 but not completed until two decades later, presents a view of a metropolitan landscape as seen through glass and chrome reflections. “The Sacred Art of Tibet” (1972) serves up a hypnotic mix of painting and sculpture in its celebration of Tibetan Buddhist theology. Jordan's feature-length live action films, on the other hand, require a bit more patience: the 86-minute Sophie's Place offers a dizzying (if confusing) span of times and cultures, while the H.D. Trilogy Film presents an uneasy mix of Hilda Doolittle's poetry set against European travelogue-style footage. Although Jordan's work seesaws between the sublime and the flawed, his imagination and originality never falter, and this collection will be of serious interest to anyone with a passion for non-commercial animation and experimental narrative filmmaking. Recommended. (P. Hall)