Filmmaker, Azazel Jacobs: My name is Azazel Jacobs.
Filmmaker, Ken Jacobs: This is Ken Jacobs.
Azazel Jacobs: My father started working on this film, Star Spangled, in '56.
Ken Jacobs: I'd met Jack Smith, and he was really one of the fabulous characters of all time. He enjoyed being a bastard. He was in opposition, very demonstrative, a devil, and pretty great.
Azazel Jacobs: And he inspired the film. Was he the kickoff?
Ken Jacobs: Yes. He and a fellow called Jerry Sims, who was a Lower East side product of poverty but was very smart, very well-read, and very bitter. These two characters kind of drove the film.
Azazel Jacobs: It's a seven hour film. And at a certain point, I guess in 1960, he had to put it down. It became too expensive to continue. And the moment that he retired from teaching, the technology had changed so much that he was able to dive back into this film that he put down 40 years earlier.
It's a collection of things that were shot in the moment, interspersed with all sorts of found footage—some of it quite disturbing, some of it humorous—and then video that he was shooting as the country was deeply involved in Iraq and everything that had happened after 9/11. There's also lots of writing, almost like diaries, and I think they're just a snapshot of this time in his life and the way that he saw the world.
The strangest thing about the film is that it's unrelentingly about depressing, horrific things. And at the same time, I find it a joyful movie, ultimately. It does seem to be an oddly optimistic film about just being grateful to be alive and to have this time on this planet, regardless of the things that we do to each other.
Ken Jacobs: True. I fear cruelty, despise it, and it exists. It's often called patriotism.