# Jordan Belson [Wikipedia Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Belson) ( 1926 – 2011 ) ## Description American filmmaker who made slow, abstract, mandalic "cosmic cinema" — luminous, meditative animation drawing on astronomy, Tibetan Buddhism, and Kabbalah — first in the multimedia Vortex Concerts (with Henry Jacobs, 1957–59, at San Francisco's Morrison Planetarium) and then in a long series of films including *Allures* (1961) and *Samadhi* (1967). ## Key Tags #visual-music #expanded-cinema #west-coast #light-art #occult ## Essential Works - *Allures* (1961) - early mature abstract film combining painted and photographed light forms into a slow cosmological unfolding - *Samadhi* (1967) - mandalic, meditative animation named for the Buddhist/yogic state of unified consciousness ## Details Profiled at length by [[Gene Youngblood]] in Part Three of [[Expanded Cinema]] ("Toward Cosmic Consciousness") as the model of a small-scale, personal "cosmic cinema" set against Kubrick's large-scale *2001*. His films grew out of the multi-projector Vortex Concerts, planetarium-based audiovisual events combining film, light, and sound, and remain a touchstone of visual-music and transpersonal/psychedelic cinema. ### Concepts and Theories - [[Transpersonal and Consciousness Studies]] - his "cosmic cinema" is Youngblood's central example of expanded-consciousness filmmaking - [[Symbolism, Theology, and Occultism]] - drew on Tibetan Buddhism, Kabbalah, and astronomy as sources for his cosmological imagery ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Collaborators - [[Gene Youngblood]] - profiled Belson at length in *Expanded Cinema* as the exemplar of cosmic/expanded-consciousness cinema - [[Bruce Conner]] - contemporary in the postwar San Francisco experimental film milieu ### Institutional Affiliations and Associated Movements - [[Vortex Concerts]] Between 1957 and 1959 at the Morrison Planetarium [notes](http://see-this-sound.at/works/450.html) ## References ### Primary Sources Bibliography Belson, Jordan, director. *Samadhi*. 1967. Mandalic, meditative animation exemplifying his mature "cosmic cinema" practice. ### Secondary Sources Bibliography Youngblood, Gene. *Expanded Cinema*. P. Dutton & Co., 1970. Profiles Belson at length in Part Three; see [[Expanded Cinema]].