Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
HIS FAVORITE FILMS IMPROVED: THE FOUND FOOTAGE FILMS OF KEN JACOBS
July 2 – July 10
Our once-a-calendar spotlight on the ever-expanding, mind-bogglingly expansive, ceaselessly experimental cinema of Ken Jacobs continues in July with a special focus on the work he’s created using found materials. Whether utilizing moving images, photographs, stereo slides, or audio, throughout his career Jacobs has steered the avant-garde tradition of found-footage filmmaking in typically radical and trail-blazing directions. Even within his own body of work, his approach to found materials is thrillingly varied. His early classic PERFECT FILM is a kind of cinematic ready-made, a found 16mm reel distributed unaltered; the extraordinary GLOBE adopts as its soundtrack “The Sensuous Woman,” the spoken-word, record-album adaption of the 1960s-era book on female sexuality; while his magnum opus, STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH, contains such large chunks of unaltered audio-visual material that it becomes more of a compendium of (socially and historically revealing) moving-image artifacts – an archive in and of itself – than a collage film. At the other end of the spectrum, in his more recent works Jacobs delights in digitally manipulating early 20th-century film reels and stereo-slides, isolating details and gestures, and by various means – including his (patent-pending) Eternalism 3D process – re-animating these materials into stunningly dynamic new life.
Join us for a special 4th of July weekend devoted to STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH (consider it an anti-patriotic duty), followed soon thereafter by screenings of ONTIC ANTICS, TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES, and two programs of short films demonstrating Jacobs’s proclivity for and mastery of found-footage filmmaking.
