KEN JACOBS TURNS 80! A recap of Programs 5 and 6

Sunday 5/26/13: As filmgoers entered the Maya Deren Theater at Anthology Film Archives for Program 5 of the Ken Jacobs screenings, we were handed old fashioned red and blue 3D glasses (red for the left eye and blue for the right). Surveying the modest crowd, Jacobs, in attendance again with Flo Jacobs, called us the die-hards. Once making sure we had been supplied with our glasses, the festivities began.

America At War, a rarely seen 3D film, is almost exclusively for and a critique of New York filmgoers in the twenty-first century. Perhaps it represents only a select few one percenters/cineastes, but its message became fully apparent upon conclusion. Taking place on opening night of the 2010 New York Film Festival at the famed Alice Tully Hall, Jacobs' camera incorporates available audio to then slow it down, while supplying visuals which literally stop and start – it plays like a badly scratched DVD about to be put out to pasture. The intentionally choppy rhythm takes some getting used to, but the visuals are worth deciphering. Some of them include sitting inside Alice Tully Hall waiting for the opening night film, The Social Network, to begin, exiting the theater and walking into the fancy and ever-crowded lobby, walking to the city streets outside, passing a fancy display car on the sidewalk, and heading to the 66th Street subway station to catch the downtown 1 train; America At War is shot as a 1st person, POV walk-thru. Text eventually arrives on screen alerting us of the terrible atrocities occurring overseas while these oblivious New Yorkers take in a movie (Exxon, Obama, "foreign crooks," and more get ripped to shreds) and the piece becomes overtly political, if not polemical. To us moviegoers gathered together on this Sunday afternoon, it may also have proven self-reflexive. Afterwards, Jacobs rhetorically proclaimed, "good movie, big crowd, where is the war?"

Another Occupation, a mostly black-and-white found footage film featuring clips of oppressed Bangkok workers, tells us that "the most debased form of slave is the soldier." This places the footage into a specific time period. Like a cinematic accordion and, at times, a cinematic pop-up book, Jacobs distorts the image in a plethora of ways, the exposed negative-look occasionally morphing into brightly colored panels. As the film progresses, we are treated to music and on-screen text flashing before our eyes in an instant. If only we had a remote control on hand to pause the footage and read it.

Seeking The Monkey King is a film I have seen three times now and, viewed post 2012 presidential election, I find it to be extremely vital as a historical artifact. Some of its references have become thankfully dated (text discussing a certain Mormon candidate hiding money in offshore bank accounts shoutouts a "remember him?" Mitt Romney) and others more pressing (Bradley Manning's trial began last Monday). Once the piece sheds light on historical revisionism apparent in mass-marketed DVDs like Warner Bros' 1982 film Poltergeist, necessary paranoia begins to rear its head. The visuals consist of cramped tin foil bathed in extreme blue and yellow flashing light, and viewers are welcomed to take from it what they will. Time and time again, I still see specific images in the mountain of tin foil – such as human skulls and mysteriously lurking dogs and cats – so they must be there...right? This is an exciting movie which enables a musical score to increase its dramatic heights and uses inspiring references (Brakhage, Deren, Tod Browning's Freaks) to make a statement on allowing the past to contextualize the present and beyond. It's a somewhat angry movie with optimism slightly below the surface.

Program 6 began with Keaton's Cops, a short Buster Keaton film (Cops) missing most of its image. Darkness fills most of the screen with about less than a quarter of the image peering out underneath; this is an ideal work for shoe fetishists. Horse hoofs, human feet, carriage wheels, and a stampede of policemen are some of the visuals we gather, and it's fun working to piece together the narrative clues. When he began working on Keaton's Cops, Jacobs was interested in the flatness of the screen, and rather than attempt an exercise in visual obscurity, the screen seeks to draw us in and think. Passive viewers need not apply.

His Favorite Wife Improved (or The Virtue of Bad Reception) invites the idea of annoying digital cable flaws as a form of analysis. Directed in part by Mother Nature, this clip from My Favorite Wife, on cable during a rainy New York day in 2008, is presented uncut, with pixelations and skippage finding aesthetic harmony as images overlap and get left behind thanks to horrible reception. Normally thought of as an eye sore, this short shows that mixed signals can unexpectedly entertain and provoke.

We were next shown six very brief shorts which Jacobs described as stereographs coming alive through rapid juxtaposition. Using a still image, Jacobs investigates its details and works hard to punctuate their meaning. He digs into the photograph and then pulls out. With that being said, Nymph is probably the most interesting of them all. We see men fawning over/leaping toward a desirable young woman and then notice a less attractive woman looking on in the background, disinterested. Opening with a closeup on a sculpted nude woman table object, Jacobs later cuts between the sculpture and the real woman, literally being objectified, as their bodies align and are matched. Also unique is The Discovery, first showing us a man and woman canoodling before pulling back to reveal another woman walking into the room. Thus, the initial emotion flirts with love until we discover the entire picture and identify it as one about infidelity and deception.

Disorient Express is a 35MM POV train ride briskly moving through the woods and into its station. A line coming down the middle of the frame allows for two separate images which go forward, backward, upside down, etc. Is this a prequel to Another Occupation? No, but some stylistic choices are shared between the two. The trees often at the center of the frame resemble a moth's wings spread open and zoomed in upon. Are we going through a birth canal or into one? As one audience member voiced, Disorient Express fells like a Rorschach test on celluloid.

As the evening concluded, with respect and gratitude filling the screening space, only one thought came to mind: here's to an 81st birthday retrospective for Mr. Jacobs next year! Once you're hooked, you really can't get enough.