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.

The cinema is Jonas Mekas
April 19-20 2013
International House Philadelphia
3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104, USA

"The real history of cinema is invisible history:  
history of friends getting together, doing the thing they love."
~ Jonas Mekas, "Anti-100 Years of Cinema"   

International House Philadelphia will conclude our yearlong retrospective The Cinema is Jonas Mekas by bringing the renowed director and his friends to the Ibrahim Theater for two days of talks, screenings, and Q&As. Such an event is particularly fitting considering the director's emphasis on documenting his life and the lives of his friends. Many of his films act as extended portraits of artists and the time from which they came, cinematic ruins that provide a stunning compendium for reflection and historical archiving.

Friday April 19 at 7pm: "Friends and Artists" screening with introduction + Q&A with Jonas Mekas
- Film Magazine of the Arts (Jonas Mekas, US, 1963, 16mm, color, 20 min.)
- Scenes of the Life of Andy Warhol (Jonas Mekas, US, 1990, 16mm, color, 36 min.)
- Street Songs (Jonas Mekas, France, 1983, 16mm, b/w, 11 min.)
- Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (Jonas Mekas, USA, 1992, 16mm, color, 35 min.)

Saturday April 20 at 2pm: Panel discussion: "My Friends! The Life and Work of Jonas Mekas" (Free admission!)
Panel discussion with Jonas Mekas, film critic Amy Taubin, French filmmaker Jackie Raynal and curator Ed Halter, moderated by curator/filmmaker Andrew Lampert.
This discussion will utilize expert panelists, each of whom has a different connection to Mekas’ life and work. They will share their perspectives on his film and video practice, the influence he has had on moving image culture and how he became the central figure in American independent film.

Saturday April 20 at 7pm: Selections from The 365 Days Project with introduction + Q&A with Jonas Mekas
(Jonas Mekas, US, 2007, digital, 137 min.)
This program features selections of the short digital films Mekas posted daily throughout 2007. Combining brand-new footage with older material unearthed and made public for the first time, The 365 Days Project was both a bold leap into the digital world for Mekas and a natural extension of the approach to cinema–small-scale, intimate, and direct–that he had been practicing in his diary films for decades.

Sarah Pucill: Magic Mirror
Monday 22 April 2013, 18:30h
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium
Bankside, London SE1 9TG

- Magic Mirror (Sarah Pucill, UK 2013, 16 mm transferred to digital video, 75 min)

This screening features the premiere of Sarah Pucill’s new film exploring the work of surrealist Claude Cahun.

Part essay, part film poem, Magic Mirror translates the startling force of Claude Cahun’s ouvre into a choreographed series of tableaux vivants. Re-staging the French Surrealist’s black and white photographs with selected extracts from her book Aveux Non Avenus (Confessions Untold), the film explores the links between Cahun’s photographs and writings.

Cahun’s multi-subjectivity, as expressed in both her photographs and book, set the scene for the film, where she dresses and makes her face up in many different ways, swapping identities between gender, age and the inanimate. Three women masquerade as Cahun’s characters: often it is hard to tell them apart. The splitting of identity appears as a double which persists throughout; as literal double through super imposition, as shadow, imprints in sand, reflections in water, mirror or distorting glass. Likewise, the voice is split between differently dressed voices, which at times overlap, and at times are in conversation. The kaleidoscope aesthetic that runs through the film serves not only to weave between image and word but also between the work of Cahun and the films of Sarah Pucill, creating a dialogue between two artists who share similar iconography and concerns.

The screening will be followed by a discussion between Sarah Pucill and writer, curator and artist David Campany.

Presented in association with LUX

Millennium Film Workshop Personal Cinema Series at The New School
Intimate Projections: Experimental Diary Films
Featuring: Barbara Hammer, Peter Hutton, and Amie Siegel
Wednesday, April 17 2013, 19h
Wollman Hall
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street), New York
Admission: Free

The final program in a three-part series presenting personal visions of cinema’s potential as an artistic medium, “Intimate Projections,” features three internationally exhibited filmmakers whose meditative, insightful, and critical engagements with the diary form speak volumes about the aesthetic, political, and historical dimensions of this cinematic mode. From Peter Hutton’s lyrical reverie in the day-to-day to the charged, poetic feminism of Barbara Hammer’s Psychosynthesis Trilogy to Amy Siegel’s examinations of performed and projected identities in appropriated Youtube videos, the works presented in this program explore the vast reach of the diaristic gesture. The screening will be introduced by Howard Guttenplan and followed by a discussion with the artists.

Presented by the Millennium Film Workshop in partnership with The School of Media Studies and The New School for Public Engagement. The Millennium Film Workshop is a non-profit media arts center located on the Lower East Side. Since 1965 it has promoted the exhibition, production and study of avant-garde and alternative film, video and media art.