Jess's Didactic Nickelodeon & Lawrence Jordan Collages and Film

“The 40 and 1 Nights, or Jess’s Didactic Nickelodeon [1955], [consists] of a short film that Jess made in collaboration with experimental film maker Lawrence Jordan (born 1933), whose collage animations and films chimed with, and were inspired by, the works of Jess. The collaboration began in 1956 when Jordan filmed a collage suite by Jess made the previous year. [This collage suite was thought to be lost until it resurfaced in 2014]. In The 40 and 1 Nights, forty-one images of Jess’s paste-ups appear in rapid succession, each accompanied by a corresponding snippet of music and ambient sound chosen by Jess, such as the voice of Irish novelist James Joyce, whose radically fractured textual narratives paralleled his own visual experiments.” 

-Nicholas Cullinan, May 2010