DUO CONCERTANTES has two parts, THE CENTENNIAL EXPOSITION and PATRICIA GIVES BIRTH TO A DREAM BY THE DOORWAY. Both PATRICIA and HAMFAT ASAR (made the following year), the two most spectacular of Lawrence Jordan's animated works, operate against the backdrop of a fixed scene. In the former, it is a back view of a lady framed in a doorwar looking out upon woods and a lake; in the latter, Jordan uses an engraving of a seacoast with cliffs. Time and a change of culture have given a surrealistic and nostalgic aura to Victorian steel engravings, as Max Ernst and several collagists between him and Jordan have known for many decades. Where Ernst slammed together radically incongruent images from such found material and thereby released the terrors of monstrosities, Jordan has chosen to refine their delicacy and to push his images almost to the point of evanescence, a limit represented in several collages by the reductive metaphor of a film within a collage-film flickering with pire imageless light.
