"Evolving the structure or script for the film involved a process of controlled hallucination, whereby I sat quietly without moving, looking at the background until the pieces began to move without my inventing things for them to do. I found that, given the chance, they really did have important business to attend to, and my job was to furnish them with the power of motion. I never deviated from this plan" - Larry Jordan .
"The title of this film conjoins a made-up name for Lawrence Jordan's home, "Hamfat," with the archaic name "Asar" for Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld. Jordan explains that, "Every culture has a relation to symbols. Every culture has their ways of getting at the infinite. I especially like Egyptian culture in that way. So many of their symbols and practices are about getting in touch with an afterlife. Everyone has an inner personal place, a yearning. And, most artists get at that through representation.
"The strangeness of this film is laced with carefully molded apocalypses as the filmmaker explores a vision of life beyond death—the Elysian fields of Homer, Dante's Purgatorio, de Chirico's stitched plain. A moving single picture.
"Larry Jordan’s meticulous and wondrous body of work—animated collages of 19th-century engravings, manuscripts, common symbols—plumbs the depth and mysteries of the mind. Jordan’s experimental collage films transformed familiar ‘found’ objects into Surrealist mappings of the world of the imagination—uncanny, dream-like constructed through a process of free association. A master of cut-out animation, Larry Jordan, together with mentor and visionary pioneer of the assemblage Joseph Cornell, would forge an American Surrealism unfettered by European concerns."
- Christopher Zimmerman, curator of The Alchemical Films of Larry Jordan, 2018
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