Ken Jacobs is one of the greatest personalities of avant-garde cinema. His extensive work smoothly proceeds between the forms of film, video and live performance and oscillates around the appropriation of found material. In an artistic career which has spanned over 50 years, we can find radical revisions of basic cinematic principles and original deconstruction of film aesthetics and narrative..
He was born in 1933 in New York and studied painting under the abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman at the City College. At the same college he passed two film courses; camera and editing. In the mid 50's he met another legendary American filmmaker, Jack Smith. Together they made such films as Blonde Cobra (1962) and Little Stabs at Happiness (1959−63). Over the same period he started work on his magnum opus, Star Spangled to Death (1957). He revised it many times and finally released it in a completely different version (lasting almost 7 hours) in 2004.
From the 80's he worked on Nervous System Performances − a series of films and live performances − he described his relation to existing film images as "mining". Radically reducing a displayed image to a few recurring film frames, enlarging the detail, slowing the motion, or modifying the image using the mask is, for Jacobs, a method of extracting from the original material every piece of information and the final elicitation of every meaning hidden on the image carrier. We are forced by monotonous epileptic gleams to watch the image without the certainty of our own perception. But at the same time Jacobs reveals, not only the formal attributes of image, but also the hidden cultural, social and ideological levels of the original film, or new narrative connections (Capitalism: Child Labor, 2006).
Ken Jacobs is one of few filmmakers whose work does resonate with the same intensity in every media he uses. From film material to buildit- yourself projectors, video and digital images. In his recent films he uses, with unshakable creative irony, mistakes in satellite signals (His Favorite Wife Improved, 2008) or 3D projection (Anaglyph Tom, 2008).
Martin Blažíček
11 Dec 5:00 p.m. Theatre — CELESTIAL SUBWAY LINES / SALVAGING NOISE — John Zorn, Ken Jacobs — USA — 2005 — Live Animation
Recording of live projections of Celestial Subway Lines / Salvaging Noise (2005), screened within the PAF program me, is composed of four collective performances by experimental film maker Ken Jacobs and musician John Zorn in the New York Anthology Film Archive in 2004. It is visually ambitious screening, rich in stroboscopic effect, and a literal manifestation of "nervous magic lantern". (Ed.)
The Nervous Magic Lantern is a late optical invention, technically possible long before film or even photography, for projection of images that move through impossible changes in a vast illusionary depth visible – without special spectacles-to even a single eye. (Ken Jacobs, 2005)
- Ken Jacobs, 2005
