Jordan Belson (born 1926, Chicago, Illinois) is an American artist and filmmaker who has created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films spanning six decades.
Float into COSMOGENESIS, a weekend-long journey of transcendental films, lectures, and live performances celebrating the visionary art and cosmic cinema of Jordan Belson.
Presented in partnership with SF Cinematheque and BAMPFA.
Dates:
Friday, September 26, 2025 (All day) to Sunday, September 28, 2025 (All day)
In our second program focusing on Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema, Lightstruck will focus on artists who – through their visionary use of incredible machines both homemade and hi-tech – produced works that sought to extend and externalize human consciousness in a cinematic form uniting mind, heart, spirit, and soul.
This programme, curated by Andrea Franco, tries to capture the fascination for Astronomy and the Cosmos of a series of filmmakers who, since the origins of cinema, have explored the appearance and mysteries of the universe. The screen unfolds here like a night sky capable of revealing not only phenomena invisible to the naked eye, as shown in the films by Emily Richardson or Dominic Angerame, but also extravagant fantasies, the fruit of the artist's imagination, (Segundo de Chomón, Georges Melies…).
As part of the series Science on Screen, on Friday, May 31 the Museum of the Moving Image will present a rare showcase of films connected to the origins of the popular laser light show that began at the Griffith Observatory in 1973.
Dates:
Friday, May 31, 2019 - 20:00 to Saturday, June 1, 2019 - 19:55
Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer,Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson.
Thirteen rare films featuring pre-computer abstraction, using a variety of techniques including early oscilloscope experiments, color organs, hand-drawn sound, animation drawn directly on film, painted scrolls, and optical printing. Films from the archive of Center for Visual Music.
A programme of screenings to accompany the exhibition “The Thinking Machine. Ramon Llull and the «ars combinatoria»”
Before artists worked with computers, a series of avant-garde painters such as Oskar Fischinger, Harry Smith and Jordan Belson created a form of non-narrative film that addressed geometry, the possibilities of mathematic combinations, and spirituality. After these visionaries, artists like John Whitney embraced the new synthetic image medium to continue exploring abstract animation. Many artists have followed in their wake, up until the present day.
