CYCLES (1975) by Jordan Belson
Sunday, September 28, 2025, 12:00 pm
Jordan Belson: COSMOGENESIS (Day 3)
A Symposium of Transcendental Films, Lectures, Performances and Visual Arts
Presented in association with Gray Area and BAMPFA
Festival passes and individual event tickets here
Float into COSMOGENESIS, a weekend-long journey of transcendental films, lectures and live performances celebrating the visionary art and cosmic cinema of Jordan Belson.
Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was a San Francisco-based artist and abstract cinematic filmmaker. Over six decades he created sublime, spiritually oriented films, referred to as “Cosmic Cinema” by theorist Gene Youngblood in his 1972 book Expanded Cinema. His films are influenced by many subjects including yoga, Buddhism, mandalas, Indian holy men, Tibetan mysticism, theosophy, Egyptology, Rosicrucianism, Kabbalah, Jung, magic, Tantra, alchemy, symbolism, astronomy, Japanese mon design, Arabic patterns, optical phenomena and science imagery.
From 1957–59, Belson collaborated with electronic music pioneer Henry Jacobs on the late night series Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium, an early antecedent of today’s “immersive experiences,” using 30-channels of projection and surround sound.
This program includes screenings of rarely seen, newly preserved 16mm films and selected digital preservations from the archive in collaboration with the Belson Estate and curator Raymond Foye.
Day 1 · Day 2 · Day 3
festival passes and individual event tickets here
Day 3: Sunday, September 28
Listening Room
12–1:30pm
Tickets here
Second program of Belson’s music, interviews and projections with new content.
Belson autoharp music and sound compositions, Belson taped interviews (by Paul Fillinger), and visual projections. (Content will be different from Saturday’s Listening Room.)
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Filmic Beatitudes with Brecht Andersch
2:30–4pm
Tickets here
Exploring the Beat film scene with screenings including Maclaine’s The End.
An exploration of the San Francisco Beat film scene of the 1950s centered on Jordan Belson and “madman” Christopher Maclaine, climaxing in a close examination of the first film to take the collective lunacy of the hydrogen bomb-era head-on, Maclaine’s The End, the convulsive 1953 epic photographed by Belson. The End will screen with other key representative works of its time, including a fragment documenting the Beat scene by Dion Vigne featuring Maclaine and a rare screening of a portion of Belson’s film, Autobiography(1951), which includes appearances by Harry Smith, Philip Lamantia, Gerd Stern, Christopher Maclaine and others.
SCREENING:
Jordan Belson: AUTOBIOGRAPHY (excerpt, 1951) (9 min). Screened as digital video.
Christopher Maclaine: THE END (1953) (34 min). 16mm
Dion Vigne, CHRISTOPHER MACLAINE & NORTH BEACH: FRAGMENTS (1957) (4 min) Screened as digital video.
Christopher Maclaine, THE MAN WHO INVENTED GOLD (1957) (14 min). 16mm
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The Visual Art of Jordan Belson with Raymond Foye
5–6:30pm
Tickets here
Illustrated lecture on Belson’s little-seen paintings, kinetic sculptures and drawings.
Jordan Belson was an important visual artist who earned his AB in studio art from the University of California, Berkeley, establishing a studio in Berkeley shortly after graduation. After an impressive exhibition history in his early twenties (the Pasadena Art Institute, later renamed the Norton Simon Museum; the California Palace of the Legion of Honor; the San Francisco Museum of Art; and the Museum of Non-Objective Art later renamed the Guggenheim Museum), Belson rejected the commercial art world and never again exhibited. However, he continued to create hundreds of important works. These have been the subject of three solo shows at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, and numerous museum group exhibitions. Noted curator Raymond Foye represents the Belson estate and will discuss this fascinating career.
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Jordan Belson Film Screening
7:30–9:30pm
Tickets here
Screening new 16mm preservation prints from the collection of Pacific Film Archives, with selected digital projections:
CARAVAN (1952) (3.5 min). Screened as digital video.
MANDALA (1953) (3 min). Screened as digital video.
CHRONICLE 1955) (2 min). Screened as digital video.
RAGA (1958) (7 min). Screened as digital video.
SAMADHI (1967) (6 min).16mm
COSMOS (1970) (7 min). 16mm
CHAKRA (1972) (8 min). 16mm
CYCLES (1975) (10 min). 16mm
BARDO (2001) (13 min). Screened as digital video.
(Running time 60 minutes)