Cosmic Cinema on the Beach
Before 1960s sci-fi and psychedelia, there was Jordan Belson.
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Editor’s Letter
In the News
The Gotham presents “The Future of Film Distribution”
EDITOR’S LETTER
In this week’s letter, deputy editor Maxwell Paparella takes us to Rockaway, Queens, for a screening of the psychonautic works of Jordan Belson, a mid-century magician of optics who later produced special effects for The Right Stuff. — Chloe Lizotte
During the sonic meditation, members of the audience rose one by one from their beach chairs and stepped quietly over the sand to the overturned barrel where cans of bugspray had been set out. The previous day’s rain had postponed the event, cleared the wildfire smoke from the air, and created ideal hatching conditions for mosquitoes in the brackish water just beyond the screen. We doused ourselves in DEET, accepting that a certain amount of bloodletting would be a part of this evening’s ritual.
Since 2018, the Rockaway Film Festival has been programming screenings on New York City’s beachy southeastern peninsula, whose daytime population swells in the summer months with adherents of the sun. Last Sunday, about 50 of us converged on the outdoor screen of the Arverne Cinema for a program of seven short films by Jordan Belson, the graphic film psychonaut of San Francisco, preceded by a performance by the sound-healing practitioner Lavender Suarez. (The evening was part of a new initiative to pair screenings with live music; other events this summer will include the Rockaway’s chamber music group and Rainbow Spirals, a local Grateful Dead cover band.)
Just as the last traces of light fell out of the sky, the gentle tones of Suarez’s gong and singing bowls gave way to the similar soundtrack of Belson’s own Meditation (1971), a seven-minute sequence of abstractions in blue: rising bubbles or sparks compose a vertical symmetry; clouds unform and waves retreat; water or lava erupts into ash or snow. Like nearly all of Belson’s films, this one returns repeatedly to the form of a large circle in the center of the screen, which recalls variously the eye, the Earth, the sun, a womb, a black hole.
The mind gradually unfixes language and association from these images, so that the general tenor of description is a Mad Libs of nebulous adjectives (illusionary, ethereal, gaseous, amorphous, vivid, pure, planetary), nouns (veil, grid, cell, wave, field, intensity, ecstasy), and verbs (congeals, echoes, crystallizes, radiates, expands, spirals, strobes)—combine these in any order and produce a more or less accurate moment-to-moment summary of Belson’s films, though of course that would be to miss the point.
Around this time, live-action stock footage had begun to make its way into his work, providing rare moments of definite figuration: here, a diver; elsewhere, a stovetop, a match, a freeway, an airplane, parachutists, dancers, skyscrapers, synchronized swimmers. Music of the Spheres (1977) resolves its sacred geometry with a long zoom out of a body of glimmering water to a postcard-ready shoreline view. (In 1967, Michael Snow beat him to the gag but reversed its direction, zooming through a loft apartment into a photograph of the sea for the 45 minutes of Wavelength.)
Belson was far more keen to discuss his spiritual inspirations than his materials and methods, though a 1970 essay by Gene Youngblood describes the optical bench in the artist’s North Beach studio on which he constructed his cosmic visions: “It is essentially a plywood frame around an old X-Ray stand with rotating tables, variable-speed motors, and variable-intensity lights.” He would go on to add analog video techniques to his arsenal, producing a striking admixture of the organic and synthetic. His films cannot properly be described as animations, Youngblood notes, since most of their effects were rendered and recorded in real time. For the same reason, the scholar disputes the assumption that Belson’s work is abstract; rather, “it is concrete.”
Like many other graphic filmmakers of his generation, Belson began as a painter, sometimes producing long scrolls. From there, it was a natural transition to the film reel, though he repeatedly suspended his practice for long periods of monastic contemplation. After two such years of self-imposed exile, having severed personal relationships and denied himself certain pleasures of the flesh, he emerged with Samadhi (1967), a characteristic orgy of light and sound that he called “a documentary of the human soul.” “After it was finished,” he said, “I felt I should have died. I was rather amazed when I didn’t.”
The currency of such grandiose statements has depreciated considerably in the intervening decades, as has the outsider cachet of a white man practicing Hatha yoga and Mahāyāna Buddhism, to which Belson devoted much of his life. In Visionary Film, his landmark book on the American avant-garde cinema, P. Adams Sitney traces Belson’s art not to any Eastern metaphysics in particular but rather to the Western Romantic tradition of aesthetic Orientalism that was subsequently taken up by the American Transcendentalists, a coterie to which Belson was happy to consider himself a late-arriving member.
From 1957 to 1959, he and the sound artist Henry Jacobs staged the late-night “Vortex” concerts at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, precursors to the liquid light shows and expanded cinema of the 1960s. If the films we saw under the stars in Arverne now put one in mind of a PC screensaver or the iTunes visualizer (though even those forms have become outmoded), it is because Belson’s work had a profound influence on the nascent psychedelic counterculture, parts of which became the technoutopianism of the ’90s and then the Silicon Valley techno-oligarchy of today.
After giving up on film in the early 1960s, Belson was tempted back into the fold by a Ford Foundation grant of $10,000, which he used to produce Re-Entry (1964), analogizing John Glenn’s first satellite orbit of Earth to the process of death and rebirth described in the Bardo Thodol, commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Nearly 20 years later, in 1983, he came full circle, emerging briefly from yet another period of seclusion to produce special effects for The Right Stuff (1983), Philip Kaufman’s epic of Glenn and the other pilots of the Mercury space program.
Has Belson’s work always looked like a graphic sequence in a space adventure film, or have we come to associate such things with his imagery? Youngblood charts Belson’s imprint on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and a teenaged George Lucas was apparently mesmerized by his work in the coffeehouse screenings of Bruce Baillie’s Canyon Cinema. I spent the first few films half-expecting the foreboding voiceover to drop in, or the telescoping text scroll to tell of a galaxy far, far away, but after a while one submits to these visions, both familiar and bizarre, hokey and profound, marked indelibly by the past and looking toward a future that no longer seems like our own.
Behind the screen, the blinking lights of JFK departures passed in front of the sinking crescent moon. The film scores were sometimes embellished by the occasional siren, or the soft popping of fireworks in the distance. It was impossible, in other words, to forget where and when we were, and impossible to deny the affinity between the projected images and the parabolas of flight paths, lunar phases, the stimuli of emergency response or languid spectacle, and even the throbbing itch of fresh mosquito bites. — Maxwell Paparella
IN THE NEWS
A new version of the poster for La La Land, celebrating the film’s tenth anniversary, corrects the position of Ryan Gosling’s hand. His decision to let his wrist hang slack in the film’s iconic dance sequence had reportedly haunted him for years.
Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice International Film Festival, discusses why major studios are skipping the festival circuit this year: while Warner Bros. intentionally withheld Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger (“That’s their marketing strategy. There was no room to discuss it with them.”), other hotly anticipated titles, including Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning and David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, “simply aren’t finished.”
“Before this year ends,” Elon Musk predicts, “Grok Imagine [his in-house AI image and video generator] will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.” As proof, he offers a three-minute scene featuring Mid-Atlantic accents and a depiction of the god Hermes with historically inaccurate angel wings.
THE GOTHAM PRESENTS “THE FUTURE OF FILM DISTRIBUTION”
Distribution is getting harder—fewer deals, funding evaporating, and strategies that worked even a year ago now feeling obsolete. But good distribution has always come down to two things: the logistics of the business (the sales, the rights, the windowing, the timing) and the ability to captivate audiences (the marketing, the creativity, the innovation that makes someone want to sit with your story). This workshop, designed for those who have completed a feature or are embarking on a second one, won't spend time bemoaning the past—instead, we'll look squarely at what is working in today's marketplace, how to prepare for distribution from the start of production, and how to approach your strategy proactively rather than reactively.
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