However hard we seek to analyze the work, this is a sensory film, and viewers are best served by allowing it to envelop rather than inform.Īs might be expected, there are less compelling points in the film where the rhythm falters, where extended shots of travel excursions, garden sequences and archival footage seem to meander aimlessly. Some of the sounds are recognizable, some are not, but like their image counterparts, they question each other in a constant back and forth that leaves us little room for intellectual musing.
From the start, discordant pairings of picture and sound prove unsteady groundwork that quickly detours our expectations, leaving us to fend for ourselves with regard to any understanding of what the film is all about. While he is neither a sound artist nor a musician in a formal sense, watching Circus Savage reveals that five decades of creating time-based art has nurtured in him a lyrical adaptation to sound as well as film. As a collagist masterwork in its own right, the soundtrack was culled from hundreds of hours of film sound, 1/4” magnetic tape and vinyl LP’s that Jordan collected over the years. The film itself is comprised of Jordan’s own outtakes, unfinished works, appropriations and various odds and ends. It is a twelve-hour assemblage of personal vision, and a privileged window into a life uncompromisingly dedicated to poetic investigation. Only the watching self remains, pregnant symbol in the darkness.”Ĭircus Savage is filmmaker Lawrence Jordan’s confluence of moving image and sound. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. The lie of the stationary photography is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. “The Screen flashes into light and with the picture consciousness passes across the world. “Circus Savage: A Walking Into The Becoming” By John Davis
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