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The Visionary Art of Jordan Belson by Henry Kaiser The San Francisco Bay Guardian Interviewers usually ask me two particular questions about my music. However they almost never print my true answers. The reason for this has a lot to do with the almost total obscurity of one of America's greatest filmmakers, Jordan Belson. I'd like to elucidate, to shine some light, on Mr. Belson and his films, which have become truly difficult to view since he withdrew his works from circulation back in 1978. He's continued to produce films since then and his newest, and perhaps ultimate, work, MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY will be featured with some older films in a very rare screening next Tuesday, July 21 at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley at 7:30 PM. Interviewers typically begin by asking me about my influences. I'll go on for a while mentioning Derek Bailey, Gyorgy Ligeti, B. B. King, Jerry Garcia, World Musics, Country Blues, Free Jazz, etc. But then I tell them that my favorite artist in any medium and the most influential of my heroes is the filmmaker Jordan Belson. This is invariably met with a blank look followed by my enthusiastic exposition on Belson's work and its effect upon me that is without fail deleted from the interview by the time it gets into print. Belson, a long-time North Beach resident now in his '70s, has made about 36 short, abstract or non-objective films since 1947. In the '60s and early '70s it was fairly common to see them in programs of experimental films the world over. He makes his films in his tiny apartment on a specially constructed optical bench. The films are 100% special effects. Sometimes cosmic, sometimes sub-molecular, they are like abstract paintings come to gentle and furious life. Simultaneously windows into the depths of internal spiritual processes and mega-galactic interplay, the films resemble fantastic living creatures of light that briefly enter this dimension for each screening. Even Belson's early work surpasses what George Lucas' ILM team needs millions of dollars to accomplish. Belson's work was a crucial influence on the psychedelic ending sequence to Kubrick's, 2001, A SPACE ODYSSEY. Director Phil Kaufman hired him to do some effects used in THE RIGHT STUFF. Belson has been around for a long time, but he keeps the lowest of profiles. I was fortunate to see his work when I was in my teens at about the same time that I began to play guitar. Belson's artistic innovation was a big inspiration to try to create my own personal forms of musical expression. He created images that transcended the film medium and I wished to do likewise with sonic imagery. He created his own visual language and grammar and he had a lot to say with it. Visually his films are as exquisite as anything in nature. I've kept up with his work over the years and have seen most of his films many times. It's simply my favorite art in all terms: style, technique and content. From 1957 - 1960, in collaboration with the musician Henry Jacobs, Belson staged one hundred "Vortex Concerts" in San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium. Those unprecedented presentations of abstract sounds and images are still talked about today. My own 10 year series of concerts in Oakland's Chabot Planetarium owed a great debt to those first explorations. The second question that music journalists usually ask is, "What do you think about while you are improvising?" Playing music for me is largely an internally visual experience. Even though it may look like I'm smiling at the drummer or the piano player, inside my mind, and without the addition of recreational chemicals, I'm drifting thorough glowing clouds of light among coruscating fractal and geometric forms that shimmer in and out of existence. Rivers of light, like oceanic streams of phosphorescent plankton inflamed by the wakes of playful sea lions, dance in time to the music before it happens; giving me my silent cues, like the clouds a glider pilot watches to catch updrafts. It's pretty much like I have a Jordan Belson movie running inside my head all the time, but it's easiest to look at when I'm playing music and on the edge of some kind of natural trance state. When you were a pre-school kid did you, like me, lay in your dark bedroom at night and press on the lids of your eyes to generate phosphene patterns of internal light that danced in your head before going to sleep each night? If you can remember those images - have you ever thought of the similarities that they bear to spiritual and psychedelic art through the ages? From a Tibetan mandala, to a Fillmore poster, to modern computer art, to a Rothko painting their is a not-so-hidden connection between the way our brains are wired and man's quest for spiritual understanding of the universe through visual art. When I saw my first Belson film during my second year of college, I immediately recognized this and was nonverbally transformed by his work to see all sorts of connections that I'd never seen before. Belson is one of the most original artists I know of in any medium. He created a new art form and the techniques to realize it. But beyond that, the content of his films is deep, sublime and enlightening. The films mean something, they communicate profound knowledge in dynamic, moving, visual terms. Anyone can immediately access the beauty and surface content of his work. I think Jordan has somehow found a way to project his many years of meditative spiritual quest and research outward onto filmstock. His new work, MYSTERIOUS JOURNEY (available on video from Great Media, PO Box 750517, Petaluma, Ca 94975), sums up the content of entire filmic output. As an experienced and long-time fan, my first reaction was, "Wow, Belson is telling everything us he knows this time. He's not holding anything back!" There is no better introduction to his work and at 30 minutes it's his longest film. After several movements that seem to depict Belson's lifelong spiritual journey on earth, the imagery moves through a death experience into a Tibetan Book of the Dead transitional phase and then, penultimately, into clouds of iridescent soul specks rising up over the earth like cosmic fireflies; through the heavens to ultimately meet God. But after that there's more: an eagle superimposed over the infinite depths of interstellar space banks off into the stars. At the same time its iconography seems to project both "So long," and "Let's go, follow me if you can. What's next?" Suddenly its obvious that the journey is just now beginning. Words fail in describing the richness of Belson's fantastic imagery. See the films; they will illuminate you. San Francisco Bay Guardian , 1998.
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