Ken Jacobs

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

Synopsis (by Mark McElhatten)
The cast is in flux — the animate and the inanimate get double billed with that dynamic duo — Push and Pull. If matter has consciousness and has renounced movement as Henri Bergson suggests, in order to conserve energy, then here we have a dramatic apostasy. A broken vow of stasis, a flood of energy. What beautiful instability and pulsation in this floating world off a hinge, drawn through invisible bellows, exhaled, exultant. Read More »

Quote:
Images gathered by Bob Fleischner, sound-film composed by Ken Jacobs. “Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob’s intention to create light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies, actually, two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling-out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed in a fire started when Jack’s cat knocked over a candle; Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of ’59 Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as the fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings of a new entirety. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit.Read More »

Quote:
STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH is an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a Beat playfulness.

A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith’s pre-FLAMING CREATURES performance as The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions), celebrating Suffering (rattled impoverished artist Jerry Sims) at the crux of sentient existence, is a visitation of the divine.Read More »

Quote:
Ken Jacobs’ most recent stroboscopic work transforms a typical New York street scaffolding scene into a mesmeric, Christo-esque merry-go-round.

In his most recent stroboscopic work, Canopy, Ken Jacobs sets a typical New York street scaffolding scene into mesmeric, gravity-defying motion. An elegant, immersive miniature with a strange faux stereoscopic effect, it takes off like a Christo-wrapped gravitron.Read More »

From Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art:
This structuralist dissection, enumeration, decomposition and reconstruction of a 1905 Biograph film of the same title provides a painstaking metaphysical exploration of the nature of cinema. Practically every shot and scene of the original 10-minute film is ominously “analyzed” and re-interpreted into a feature-length work by manipulation of image, introduction of slow motion, repetition, freeze-frames, abstracting, and other “subversions” of the original. Shades of Vertov!Read More »

From VILLAGE VOICE:
A shuddering, flickering tribute to two lost compatriots, Ken Jacobs’s Two Wrenching Departures took its original form in 1989 as one of Jacobs’s live “Nervous System” cine-improvisations on dual 16mm projectors. Earlier that year, his former collaborators Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith died within a week of one another—an ironic conjunction, as the pair had been at odds for years, long after Jacobs, Fleischner, and Smith had chaotically joined talents in the late ’50s to create Blonde Cobra, a grimly glamorous rummage through trash-pile transvestism that was one of the most celebrated titles of the pre-Warhol underground scene.Read More »