Carte Blanche: Ken Jacobs

By on

Rating: 

No votes yet

Carte Blanche: Ken Jacobs
May 2–5, 2013
MoMA
11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019|

As one of the founding fathers of American experimental cinema, Ken Jacobs’s impact cannot be overstated. He is a pioneer who, after more than 50 years as a filmmaker, remains as innovative and productive as ever. Correction: at 80 years old he’s more productive than ever, having enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking. Enormously influential as both a teacher and a font of radical filmmaking ideas, he has prepared several generations of teachers, writers, filmmakers, and discerning audience members to actively engage, with an equal amount of open-minded awe and healthy skepticism, with a media-saturated world. A frequent guest at the Museum—and the subject of a 1996 MoMA retrospective—Jacobs continues to surprise us with amazing inventions that mine the unlimited possibilities of creating with light and moving images. For this installment of MoMA’s Carte Blanche screening series, Jacobs presents films from MoMA’s collection that have influenced and inspired him, alongside selections of his own work—film prints, electronic media pieces, Nervous Magic Lantern performances—that represent key moments in his artistic life. The series also includes the world premiere of Jacobs’s four-part Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus cycle of digital works.

All film notes were written by Ken Jacobs, unless otherwise noted.

Programme:

Thursday, May 2 2013, 16h
Theater 2, T2
- Zero de conduite (Zero for Conduct) (Jean Vigo, 1933, 41 min.)
“I wasn’t much older than the kids in the film, already loved Chaplin and loved the earthiness mixed with movie-magic. Astonished by the dismissal of all censorship, then saw L’Atalante. Years later I’d be thwarted in my effort to name Binghamton’s new cinema department The Jean Vigo School of Film-making.” In French; English subtitles.

- Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman (Ken Jacobs, 2012, 47 min.)
With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs, Antoine Catala, Jason Drakeford.
“Animations of home stereo-pairs from the Sixties on, cyclopean because the 3-D can be seen with one eye. Flo stars, friends appear in the Kodachrome past, images of Nisi and Aza demarcate time.”

Thursday, May 2 2013, 19h
Theater 2, T2
- Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924, 22 min.)
“My first avant-garde film, the eye-opener that decided everything. Then MoMA played À nous la liberté just to make sure. It made perfect sense, and so another Lefty emerged on Rockefeller property.”

- Joys Of Waiting for the Broadway Bus 1 (Ken Jacobs, 2013, 40 min.)
With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs.
Part one of four. “Joys began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening. Since acquiring a small 3-D camera I dawdle everywhere but prolonged bus-waits allow for a continuity of images, thus a movie. Computer-editing with Nisi Jacobs allowed further investigation, this time into digital 3-D itself.” In 3-D.

Friday, May 3 2013, 16h
Theater 2, T2
- In the Street (James Agee & Helen Levitt, 1948, 14 min.)
“In the Street, the movie that gives permission. Evidence that the scenes one sees everywhere in real life are actually the makings of cinema. One only needs a camera and the streets will be forthcoming.”

- Orchard Street (Ken Jacobs, 1955, 12 min.)
“My first film, revisiting the Jewishness (permeating the street at that time) of my upbringing. My next would be Star Spangled to Death, but the shorts Little Stabs of Happiness and Blonde Cobra came out before it because I couldn’t afford to print the long film.”

- Nervous Magic Lantern Performance: Time Squared
Performed by Ken Jacobs, 60 min.
“Viewers of NML performances invariably speak of the intense movies they see in what are actually neutral visual events. It just may be that the Rorschaching the NML excites is the most valuable thing it does, but it’s not what I think about when projecting. I work at drawing (nameless) things into and out of view and directing their movements in illusionary depth. 3-D you say? But this is impossible. Exactly.”

"Please don’t knock yourself out looking for meanings in these images. I wouldn’t recognize a pictorial meaning if it was served in my soup. Pictorial pleasure is what I’m after as I listen during Time Squared to the never-ending rhapsody of the subway. Never-ending? Rhapsody? Noise! But a John Cage sort of noise where every sound feels exquisitely in place.”

Friday, May 3, 2013, 19h
Theater 2, T2
- Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934, 38 min.)
“Brakhage before Brakhage, the visual melding of shots could even make processions of religious nuts appealing. An opium dream made of shards of reality and somehow paid for by the British government, was there anything a released cinema couldn’t do?”

- Weegee’s Coney Island (Weegee, 1954, 14 min.)
Part of Weegee’s New York. “Weegee (Arthur Fellig) filmed, Amos Vogel edited. The preciousness of the avant-garde shown at Cinema 16 was interrupted by this breath of fresh air. Weegee’s panorama of the crowd may be the greatest single shot in cinedom.”

- Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus 2 (Ken Jacobs, 2013, 40 min.)
With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs.
Part two of four. “Joys began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening. Since acquiring a small 3-D camera I dawdle everywhere but prolonged bus-waits allow for a continuity of images, thus a movie. Computer-editing with Nisi Jacobs allowed further investigation, this time into digital 3-D itself.” In 3-D.

Saturday, May 4 2013, 13:30h (With live accompaniment by diNMachine)
Theater 2, T2
diNMachine is an instrumental four-piece rock band, led by keyboardist and composer Michael J. Schumacher, whose roots in experimental electronic music go back to the late 1980s. Other members are Sean Moran, guitar, Hari Ganglberger, drums, and Nisi Jacobs, bass. diNMachine uses both live instruments and prerecorded samples in composed, highly layered, genre-defying songs. The music is groove oriented, bass and drum at its core, fusing elements of noise, motorik, classical, jazz, post-punk, and 1960s surfer pop.

- Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936, 19 min.)
“Cornell interrupted his sweeping of mouse droppings to hand me the spliced original of his disregarded film. I watched it, with Jack Smith, in every permutation. Jack vowed to do a remake, daring to go beyond the color blue.”

- A Primer in Sky Socialism (Ken Jacobs, 2013, 58 min.)
"Each new year Flo and I join the young and many-languaged crowd walking to the top of Brooklyn Bridge ostensibly for the fireworks. Fact is the crowd, the bridge, comprise the spectacle. The Bridge is particularly dear to us since the 'Sixties, when we learned the story of the Roeblings, father and son and daughter-in-law. The Bridge embodies their wishes for America, their blessing, nothing less. I filmed (on 8mm.) The Sky Socialist back then and this is a follow-up." In 3-D.

Saturday, May 4, 2013, 16:30h
Theater 2, T2
- Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932, 71 min.)
“H. G. Welles takes the theory of evolution into paranoia. Creaks here and there but magnificant. I was proud when students named my classroom the House of Pain.”

- Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus 3 (Ken Jacobs, 2013, 40 min.)
With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs.
Part three of four. “Joys began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening. Since acquiring a small 3-D camera I dawdle everywhere but prolonged bus-waits allow for a continuity of images, thus a movie. Computer-editing with Nisi Jacobs allowed further investigation, this time into digital 3-D itself.” In 3-D.

Sunday, May 5, 2013, 15:30h
Theater 2, T2
- Capitalism: Slavery (Ken Jacobs, 2006, 3 min.)
Technical assistance by Erik Nelson.
“An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief.”

- Capitalism: Child Labor (Ken Jacobs, 2006, 14 min.)
Technical assistance by Erik Nelson. Music by Rick Reed.
“A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great skylit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din.”

- Blankets for Indians (Ken Jacobs, 2012, 57 min.)
Technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs, Antoine Catala.
“A 3-D movie of water interrupted by thousands of New Yorkers descending Broadway to join Occupy Wall Street.” In 3-D.

Sunday, May 5, 2013, 18h
Theater 2, T2
- Binghamton, My India (Ken Jacobs, 1970, 25 min.)
“The film said something necessary at the time: the numinous is everywhere, even upstate Rust Belt Binghamton. The light was perfect, students brilliant, America’s killing spree then in Vietnam distant.”

- The Green Wave (Ken Jacobs, 2011, 5 min.)
Technical assistance by Antoine Catala.
“A stereograph of an ocean wave breaking is suspended in time as it reshapes in time and in depth.”

- Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus 4 (Ken Jacobs, 2013, 40 min.)
With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs.
Part four of four. “Joys…began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening. Since acquiring a small 3-D camera I dawdle everywhere but prolonged bus-waits allow for a continuity of images, thus a movie. Computer-editing with Nisi Jacobs allowed further investigation, this time into digital 3-D itself.” In 3-D.

Category: