Ken Jacobs: Illuminations and Improvisations
March 14–17, 2004
For more than forty years, Ken Jacobs, whose
lifelong project has been the aesthetic, social, and physiological
critique of projected
images, has inspired the sense of awe and mystery that nineteenth-century
audiences must have felt when confronting motion pictures for the
first time. The subject of a MoMA retrospective in 1996, Jacobs returns
with three works that reinvigorate the medium by restoring it to
its first principles. He presents Ontic Antics Starring Laurel
and Hardy (1997), a Nervous System performance in which he plumbs a 1931
comedic two-reeler for unforeseen optical effects; Local Hubble
II (2004), a Nervous Magic Lantern improvisation in which he reveals
the miraculously “impossible movements, spectacular spaces,
and unthinkable transformations” that can be conjured from
a rudimentary projection device; and Star Spangled to Death (1957/2003),
his recently completed, no-budget magnum opus, which, with its fierce
political punch and Beat whimsy, could not have come at a better
time.
Organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, and Joshua Siegel, Assistant
Curator, Department of Film and Media. Sincere thanks to Flo Jacobs.
. 2004. Directed by Henry Hills.
Ken Jacobs as never before seen, flittering and flickering in this
delightful video homage
by New York experimental artist Hills; teen interviewer Emma Bee
Bernstein is Jacobs’s foil. 22 min.
. 1997. USA. Performed by Ken
Jacobs. Evanescent explorations and manipulations of time and space
in this Nervous System performance: Jacobs uses his whirligig, double-analysis
projection apparatus to mine the 1931 Laurel and Hardy comedy short
Berth Marks for its disorienting 3-D effects. Approx. 60 min.
. 2004. USA. Performed by
Ken Jacobs. Equipped with only a bulb, a cooling fan, a lens, and
a spinning shutter, Jacobs
takes us to the outer limits of cinema—a place of collisions
and collusions between two-dimensional flatness and three-dimensional
expanse, motion and stillness, cinema-illusion and incontrovertible
truth. Approx. 60 min.
. 1957/2003. USA. Ken
Jacobs. A magnificent artifact of artistic and political living
in 1950s New York, Star
Spangled, which took a half century to complete, is a collage of
found-footage material combined with Jacobs’s more-or-less
staged filming, starring Jack Smith as The Spirit Not of Life but
of Living and Jerry Sims personifying Suffering. A social critique
of a dumbed-down America, put together with incomparable style and
whimsy. Program approx. six and a half hours (shown in two parts).
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