KEN JACOBS TURNS 80! A recap of Programs 1 and 2

      This past Saturday, over a cold and often overcast Memorial Day weekend in  New York, the always experimenting filmmaker Ken Jacobs turned eighty years young. To celebrate the occasion, Anthology Film Archives programmed three nights of screenings devoted to Mr. Jacobs' less prolific, underseen work, with Jacobs and Flo, his wife, in attendance. 35MM, 16MM, digital video, 3D, and other formats all made their presence known throughout the series (there were six programs, two a night), some pieces no more than a minute long. I was able to attend Friday and Sunday's screenings and had a great time; the Jacobs family seemed to enjoy themselves as well, clearly appreciative of the fans and friends who gathered to celebrate another year in the life of a pioneering artist. What follows then are brief thoughts, descriptions, and reactions to the films shown, presented in the order in which they screened.

     Orchard Street, Jacobs' 1955 debut, is a New York movie through and through: as overly cluttered sidewalks filled with pedestrians spill out onto the street, automobiles struggle to bustle on through. The cops fail at their attempt to direct traffic. As a city cleaning truck fulfills its role, spraying water to wash away away the ever prevalent grime, Jacobs humorously cuts to a kid urinating in the street. Stray cats are also on hand, as are babies asleep in their carriages and bored sidewalk sellers almost asleep at their posts. We even get ominous shots of a couple covered in shadow, kissing out of sight as New York goes about its business. All in all, Orchard Street is a peaceful and ethnic look at a congested environment close to home.

     Artie and Marty Rosenblatt's Baby Pictures are just that: 8MM home movies that Jacobs was fascinated by. To prompt our fascination, the footage was projected in a row of theater seats to my right, placing the viewer in the setting of a house party where everyone gathered around to watch light go through celluloid.

     The Winter Footage features even more goings-on about town, this time with somewhat familiar faces and gritty street locales. Rain, snow, and people in overcoats are covered in a blue tint as this work signified the literally coldest of Jacobs' works screened Friday evening. The Hertz truck company's yellow logo is prevalent throughout, as are Flo Jacobs, more cats, and a man in an alley dancing poetically in the rain with a stripped down umbrella. By the time a fellow dressed as Hitler (or is he dressed as Chaplin as Hitler?) shows up to play an accordion with a prominent Swastika attached, the film becomes something else. The Winter Footage features impressive camera work (images eventually get laid on top of one another) and enjoyable moments of play, none more so than when Jacobs tries to interrupt an on-location film shoot before getting spotted and pushed away. Damn the angry crew member who attempts to cover his camera lens.

     Jerry Takes a Backseat, Then Passes Out of the Picture features Jacobs' children and a family friend at a local playground. As a little boy is pushed in a swing, Jacobs enthusiastically shouted out in the theater “that there is the director of Momma's Man,” that of course being director and son, Azazel Jacobs. As the film progresses, the family friend, a little odd and to himself, continues to stick around as Azazel rides his tricycle around the area. Airshaft, a film which intentionally goes in and out of focus (“that's not the projectionist playing with the focus, that's me!”), features a leafy green plant and, I think, another melancholy feline laying next to it and peering out a window. The colors stand out here as your eyes battle for visual clarity.

     After the first program concluded, Jacobs revealed some fruitful tidbits of information, one being that he often takes directions from his sleep and that he doesn't like to plan much; he finds it unbelievable how much work and effort his son takes on while crafting feature films. Jacobs instead works on impulse and with the aid of his wife's helpful critiques – after the screening, Jacobs wanted Flo to get up and say a few words for his birthday (“I won't live to be 160!”), but she playfully refused.

     Program 2 started off with The Whirled, a movie within a movie, giving us a set-up (Jacobs' black-and-white street musical) and a future context (a game show critique of the piece) before letting Jack Smith play us out. After being shown a clip from his work – featuring a cameo by the young and suave Jacobs – we are presented with footage from his appearance on a To Tell The Truth-like game show, framed as if we were watching it on the boob tube ourselves. Contestants are shown footage of Jacobs' work and are then asked to listen to three individuals' (Jacobs, fellow avant garde filmmaker Carolee Schneemann, and a salesman) contrasting identifications of it. Who is telling the truth about this bizarre footage? Jacobs and Scheemann, we are told via on-screen text, were guaranteed twenty dollars for coming on the show and promoting their work, and this sequence gets the intended big laughs. We then cut to non sequitur color footage of Jack Smith as the Fairy Vampire, running around and causing mayhem in a cemetery. Why not? Jacobs told the audience after The Whirled concluded that once Smith came out as gay, he felt that Jacobs and others were his enemies. “We were supportive,” Jacobs noted, "but it become impossible to work with him...you had fun with him, you were impressed by him, and then you were his enemy, you were done with.” Nevertheless, Jacobs still has much respect for his old friend, and it was clear that he was emotionally taken aback by seeing Smith alive and well up there on the big screen.

     Baud'larian Capers (A Musical with Nazis and Jews) is nowhere near as exciting as its provocative title suggests – black-and-white and in color, the film features occasional startling images such as two African-American boys staring at Jacobs' camera in perfectly awkward fashion – but the story behind it is funny enough. While writing for The Village Voice, good friend Jonas Mekas often wrote about what he called Baudrillardian Cinema. Jacobs, not knowing much about Baudrillard's work, thought it would be in good fun to make the film as a playful joke at Mekas' expense. There's a colorful shot of a toilet on top of a manhole cover that lingers in my brain, but I feel as though I may need a hint from Baudrillard in order to analyze its meaning.

     The third and fourth films of Program 2 featured Jacobs' close encounters with the digital kind, that being Bob Fleischner Dying and Hot Dogs at The Met. A face-first portfolio of Mr. Fleischner, Bob Fleischner Dying interprets and dissects via occasional split-screens, closeups, and momentary pauses clearly observing the man's face. We thus get the sense that we are looking at still images of Fleischner, but that they are being presented to us with extreme detail and bouts of occasional movement. Can the altered image prove more real than the original?

     Hot Dogs At The Met continues this question. Due in equal part to a man's legs in front of the camera and the digital artifacts clouding the image, we're unsure of what we're seeing at first. Once we pull back, we see the complete picture; it plays like the reverse of that scene in Blade Runner where Deckard uses a nifty machine to delve further into the image. A girl in a stroller looking away from us, people sitting on the steps in front of The Met, crowded sidewalks filled with life....it all becomes apparent as we're presented with the full metropolitan landscape. Once we see the face of the girl in the stroller (in a new still), smiling with who appears to be her older sister, Jacobs cuts to images from later that day on a graffiti-ridden subway car, complete with sounds of the screeching train. The older girl smiles at us as she holds onto the subway pole, and wait, is that Anthology co-founders Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas also riding in the car? Yes it is.

     Lisa and Joey In Connecticut, January '65: "You've Come Back!" "You're Still Here!" opens in what appears to be an art studio, complete with larger than life-sized sketches of the human body. Some of the portraits include that of a nude woman, a nude child, and a woman holding a child as she stares at a man who is most likely her husband. This is a domestic family alright, but who are they? We eventually see a real life couple with child hanging out on the street by a Hertz rental truck – Jacobs certainly has his recurring auteurist traits – cut with an old Mickey and Minnie Mouse cartoon. Are the earlier sketches a representation of this couple who in turn represent the lovers in the Walt Disney animated short? The animated characters are represented in the "real world" on a cloth which drops down to reveal the very real woman's face, so perhaps a metamorphoses is taking place. Nonetheless, the cartoon footage takes on the style of an Arabian Nights adventure tale, featuring such sights as a drunken camel and a street performer who juggles balls on his bouncing ass cheeks. As the two famous mice go on to greener pastures after escaping some sword-throwing meanies, the juxtaposed real couple in Jacobs' world would not be as lucky: they eventually divorced.

Stay tuned for a recap of Programs 5 and 6!