Psychoactive Cinema: The Sacred Art of Tibet
Psychoactive Cinema is an exploration of experimental film, guided by the twin lights of entheogenic awakening and meditative transformation. In this installment, we check out the work of Larry Jordan, from his surreal animated shorts to his psychedelic documentary, The Sacred Art of Tibet.
Hamfat Asar (1965) and Orb (1973)
“His materials, subjects, and forms coincide and envision a continuous world where strong or fragile moods are never ruptured.”
— P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film
Larry Jordan (born 1934) is best known for his cut-out animations, or “moving collages.” He’s also known as the high school chum and occasional collaborator of legendary experimental filmmaker, Stan Brakhage. And he’s known as a key figure in the early days of Canyon Cinema, a pillar of anti-commercial film distribution. Much of Jordan's filmography springs from his love for the collage novels of Max Ernst, along with Ernst’s favorite raw material of illustrations—mostly 19th-century engravings—from old books and ephemera. (In Hamfat Asar, it’s easy to spot the same Victorian-era pin-up that Victor Moscoco appropriated for one of his iconic Neon Rose concert posters.)
Victor Moscoco, Neon Rose #2 (The Miller Blues Band @ Matrix, Jan. 1967).
Comparisons to the Monty Python-era animation of Terry Gilliam are inevitable, and surrealism is a mutual influence, although Gilliam claims he “didn’t even know about Max Ernst” until a TV critic made the connection. While Gilliam’s work is known for its impish iconoclasm, Jordan indulges in a sense of mystery that approaches the numinous. Hamfat Asar is a parade of oneiric imagery, carried back and forth across an idyllic background (and sometimes over a tightrope) by spirited hand drumming. Orb swaps out the percussion for bewitching chimes (with some corny calliope in the back half, for some reason), and adds a dose of saturated COLOR.
In a 1996 interview, Jordan makes an analogy between surrealist collage art and Rorschach tests, and insists:
“ … the collage of Max Ernst is like a very sophisticated inkblot … you take one of those collages out of A Woman With a Hundred Heads and look at it and what's that all about? Everybody's going to say something different, and what they say will have nothing to do with Max Ernst; it will have to do with themselves … Is that a new function of art? I don't think it was the intended function of art previous to modernism.”
In the same interview, Jordan fondly recalls:
“ … the first time I realized that that's what I was trying to do. I wasn't trying to pass what was in my mind to somebody else's mind. I was trying to put up a Rorschach inkblot kind of imagery on the screen that other people would then take and combine with their own, I call predispositions, and make meaning, their own meaning, not my meaning out of it.”
He came to this realization thanks to a review of Hamfat Asar in The Village Voice, in which the critic “described in detail a scene … which did not exist, and I thought, ‘She's hallucinated.’ That's what I'm trying to get. I've succeeded. She's had a full, complete hallucination during that film.”
The Sacred Art of Tibet (1972)
“The making of The Sacred Art of Tibet was a long and arduous process. And it made a deep impression in my life. The film culminated a long period of research into Northern Buddhist philosophy. I met an extraordinary lama from a land that has caused Westerners so much romantic speculation. I found Tarthung Tulku one of the most down-to-earth people I have ever met. He guided, more he suggested, the film. He instructed me to the symbolism every step of the way. When the film was finished he said that viewing it was to him like what an acid trip must be to a Westerner. I believe he meant it as a compliment.”
—Larry Jordan
The Sacred Art of Tibet was inspired by an exhibition of the same name, held in San Francisco during 1970. The copyright holder is the Tibetan Nyingmapa Meditation Center of Berkeley, CA, founded in 1969 by the above-mentioned Tarthang Tulku, who appears briefly near the end of the film. The production was funded by the Guggenheim Fellowship which Jordan received in 1970.
With Sacred Art, Jordan’s years of experience as a filmmaker and animator elevate what could have been just a dry Dharma talk. During a 1973 lecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, when asked about “the way that the screen is manipulated” (in particular, the lighting effects), he replied:
“It develops out of that one basic need that I had, to make still paintings and still sculptures seem to move and come to life ... so I did a lot of things that turn out to be repetitve, and all I can hope for is a rhythm through the repetition ... I don’t like films that flash from beginning to end, and I think Sacred Art of Tibet is right on the verge of being that. I did cut down things, and I still think that it’s very close to being excessive. All my films are more or less excessive.”
Besides the kinetic lighting and editing, the soundtrack also helps propel this “personal doc” into the outer reaches of inner space, as mantras and dungchen (Tibetan horns) swirl in a heady mix along with the sci-fi oscillations of an early synthesizer.
Sacred Art is an introduction to the core deities and bodhisattvas of Vajrayāna Buddhism:
“Who are they, and what do they represent? Is this idolatry? Devil worship? Magic? Demonology? Or are we dealing with psychic principles of a far higher order? The Tibetans do not consider the deities to exist outside the mind. And yet, the mind being all, that is the most existence there can be ... It will be hard for many of us to comprehend the directness with which the Tibetans have symbolized the various energies, latent and active, in the mind ... These symbols contain the essence of all the concepts leading to ultimate enlightenment ... The Tibetans merely painted all this as lessons, and the deities are stepping stones to these truths.”
Like these paintings and sculptures, the artistic medium of film, in a way analogous to (and even synergistic with) psychedelic drugs, opens up the possibility of a tantric path which transmutes the delusion of the senses—what John Blofeld has described as “the enchanting rainbows and terrifying thunder-clouds of illusion that veil the still, clear Void beyond”—into an instrument rather than an obstacle. If, as the opening of Sacred Art declares, everything “we see and hear as reality is a magical show, a shifting play of illusion clinging to sensual perceptions,” then the skillful bodhisattva must also be a master showman.
“Time, energy, and mind alike are the great magician, presenting existence, revealing the magician as another magical apparition.”
—Tarthang Tulku, Knowledge of Time and Space
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Bonus Content!
Here’s an excerpt from David LeBrun’s Tanka (the full 8-minute film is unavailable online, but available here), assembled from footage of thangka or tanka, the Tibetan scroll paintings mentioned in The Sacred Art of Tibet. The goal here is the same: to make still paintings “seem to move and come to life.”
Along with Peter Mays (The Star Curtain Tantra), LeBrun is an original member of Single Wing Turquoise Bird, the premiere psychedelic light show in Los Angeles from the late ‘60s to the mid ‘70s. In recent years, SWTB has reunited to record and perform new material, such as Invisible Writing, which was commissioned by the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009.
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