Born in Chicago and raised in the Bay Area, Jordan Belson trained as a painter before turning his attention to filmmaking after discovering the abstract films of Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, and Hans Richter at the seminal Art in Cinema series. Since 1947, Belson has explored consciousness, transcendence, and the nature of light itself in a visionary body of work that has been called “cosmic cinema” – brimming with vibrant color, mandalas, liquid forms, and mesmerizing rhythms. Starting in 1957, Belson collaborated with sound artist Henry Jacobs on the “Vortex Concerts,” multimedia events that combined new electronic music from around the world with Belson’s visual effects projected on the interior of the sixty-five-foot dome of the California Academy of Science’s Morrison Planetarium. This program features rarely screened films including Séance (1959), new preservation prints of Momentum (1968) and Chakra (1972), and Epilogue (2005), a distillation of sixty years of visionary images synchronized to a symphonic tone poem by Rachmaninoff, and more.

Caravan (with music by Dizzy Gillespie)
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1952, 16mm, 4 mins, color

Séance
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1959, 16mm, 3 mins, color

Allures
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1961, 16mm, 8 mins, color, sound by Jordan Belson and Henry Jacobs

Re-Entry****
1964, originally 16mm, screened on Digibeta, color, sound, 6 mins

Momentum
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1968, 16mm, 6 mins, color

Chakra
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1972, 16mm, 6 mins, color, sound by Jordan Belson

Light
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1973, 16mm, 6 mins, color sound by Jordan Belson

Cycles (with music by Stephen Beck)
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1974, 16mm, 10 mins, color

Music of the Spheres (with music by Iasos)
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 1977 (abridged version 2002), 16mm transferred to DigiBeta, 7 mins, color

Epilogue
dir. Jordan Belson, US, 2005, DigiBeta, 12 mins, color, commissioned for the Visual Music Exhibition by The Hirshhorn Museum, with the support of the NASA Art Program and CVM