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Films by Larry Jordan
Capsule by Fred Camper
From the Chicago Reader
Stretching across five decades, Larry Jordan's output has sometimes been uneven, but Sophie's Place, a 90-minute 1986 animation that took him seven years to make, is a clear masterpiece. He uses engravings of Hagia Sophia, the famous Istanbul building that began as a Christian church in the sixth century and later became a mosque, filling its vast interior with body parts, plants, and animals, along with hand-colored animations of Eadweard Muybridge's famous proto-cinematic photographs of human and animal movement. These delicately enchanted images eschew commercial slickness and evoke a fragile magic, and the almost infinitely suggestive melange of symbols results in a cross-cultural spiritual journey that's appropriate to the current status of Hagia Sophia as an ecumenical museum. On the same program, Jordan's Once Upon a Time (1974, 12 min.).
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