Maker: Jim Davis
Original format: 16mm sound film 1.37:1

This is a kind of music made to be looked at - or a kind of abstract dance. There is a conscious attempt to invent forms which suggest - in wholly nonscientific terms - the new and unfamiliar world which modern science is revealing. -Jim Davis

Jim's films are a meditation on imagination of light. -Stan Brakhage

I try to leave the imagination of the spectator as free as possible by using purely invented, abstract forms rather than representational forms. In watching these films it is not necessary to search for hidden meanings or to try to associate these invented forms with familiar objects. The spectator may simply relax and look at these films as one would listen to music in order to fully respond to them. -Jim Davis

Jim Davis (1901-1974) was raised in West Virginia and attended Princeton University. He was a painter and a member of the art department at the University. In the 1930s, he began to paint on glass and plastic instead of canvas. Early in the 1940s he discovered light reflections created by sunlight streaming through the window and learned how to cast prismatic light patterns with transparent plastic mobiles. Then, in 1946, he turned to filmmaking to record the "changing forms of color." -Robert A. Haller