Return to LH6
Curated by Ken Jacobs
Light Industry
220 36th Street, 5th Floor
Brooklyn, New York
http://www.lightindustry.org
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 7:30pm
"Binghamton, 1969 to 2002. I started in LH1, a much larger room than LH6, hundreds of students but most expected to see only popular movies and a reflection of their own casual and superior attitudes. They weren't the only defiantly stupid ones (seeing that nothing is more worth critical attention than the phenomena of cinema). Established teachers had railed against a Cinema Department before I arrived as a further appeasement of spoiled and rebellious students and a desecration of the discipline of teaching. They had gone off-campus to complain to the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, turds that supported the slaughter of Vietnamese and decried the influx of NewYorkCommieFagNiggerlovingJews, and allies in the protection of students from persons arrested for the screening of Flaming Creatures.
"I then believed that anyone could become a real student (wrong!), just as I was an anyone that had become a teacher. I had prepared by attending The Laff Movie on 42nd Street. It had first influenced my making of Star Spangled to Death and now my teaching. I can't recall the advertising of specific films on the marquee. It was a place for poor men to sleep off a drunk while old comedies were screened, sometimes entire films and sometimes comic sections of films. Film clips! This was indeed revolutionary thinking. One standard applied: whatever was selected had been thoroughly dismissed from public memory, certainly from the few film-history books that then
existed. The great nameless and unthanked anti-snob curator of The Laff Movie, my mystery Professor! Thou scummy and dreary University, where hot dogs and candy bars and drinks were hawked up and down the aisles during screenings, only you, for a quarter, showed me the pre-code Thirties, introducing me to the real Eddy Cantor and Jimmy Durante and Busby Berkeley
in their pre-code prime, when they were forces.
"I expanded on the Laff Movie selections so one never knew what to expect and I disapproved of introductions: students were expected to grapple, and then there'd be talk, lots of it. Assuming I still have something of my teaching chops, you're welcome to sit in on a re-creation of cinema studies
in LH6. (I would sometimes screen some of my own stuff so there just might be samplings and discussion of recent Ken Jacobs work.)" - KJ
Followed by a conversation between Jacobs and Amy Taubin.
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Ken Jacobs, was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1933. He studied painting with one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the mid-fifties. It was then that he also began filmmaking (Star Spangled To Death). His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker's co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at
little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens.
In 1969, after a week's guest seminar at Harpur College (now, Binghamton University), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration -during that special period of anguish and possibility- decided that, as a teacher, he
was "a natural." Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system's first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The
Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989, The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin's DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty
Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant. A 1999 interview with Ken Jacobs can be seen on the Net as part of The University Of California at Berkeley's series of Conversations With History.
Tickets - $7, available at door.
About Light Industry
Light Industry is a new venue for film and electronic art in Brooklyn, New York. Developed and overseen by Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, the project has begun as a series of events at Industry City in Sunset Park, each organized by a different artist, critic, or curator. Conceptually, Light Industry draws equal inspiration from the long history of alternative art spaces in New York as well its storied tradition of cinematheques and other intrepid film exhibitors. Through a regular program of screenings, performances, and lectures, its goal is to explore new models for the presentation of
time-based media and foster an ongoing dialogue amongst a wide range of artists and audiences within the city.
About Industry City
Industry City, an industrial complex in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, is home to a cross-section of manufacturing, warehousing and light industry. As part of a regeneration program intended to diversify the use of its 6 million square feet of space to better reflect 21st century production, Industry City now includes workspace for artists. In addition to offering studios at competitive rates, Industry City also provides a limited number of low-cost studios for artists in need of reasonably priced space. This program was conceived in response to the lack of affordable workspace for artists in New York City and aims to establish a new paradigm for industrial
redevelopment--one that does not displace artists, workers, local residents or industry but instead builds a sustainable community in a context that integrates cultural and industrial production. For more information:
http://www.industrycityartproject.org
March 20-22, 2009 at 
This month’s film programme pays homage to Discrepant Cinema, the bold manifesto by one of the most radical filmmakers in film’s history: Jean-Isidore Isou. According to Isou, one must divide to conquer. This applies to the two wings of cinema: sound (speech) and image, which he wanted by all means to sever: “I want to separate the ear from its movie master: the eye.” Isou advocated for a cinema in which the images, in their photographic and representative obsolescence, must rot, giving way to the breakage of the spontaneous association that made speech the correspondent of vision. “Who ever said that cinema, whose meaning is motion, has to be the motion of images and not the motion of words?” Isou proclaimed.
CINEMA ABATTOIR