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Essay by Scott McDonald to accompany Ken Jacobs program 

            Major contributions to cinema history can come in various sizes. Orson Welles astonished early, then struggled for decades to add to his legacy, whereas John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock astonished early and continued to astonish, not merely with the films they produced in their final decades—but with their stamina as filmmakers. Among independents, Kenneth Anger amazed us from Fireworks through Lucifer Rising, but in more recent decades has struggled to find the resources and the energy to complete films, whereas Stan Brakhage was astonishingly productive of first-rate films from his earliest experiments until his last days. Among living independent filmmakers, only Jonas Mekas and James Benning exhibit Brakhage’s stamina—and, of course, the indefatigable Ken Jacobs.

            Jacobs has worked in a wide variety of ways during his long career, which began with Orchard Street in 1956 and the epic Star Spangled to Death (1958-1960, 2003-2004), and this still-passionate artist continues to astonish, nearly 60 years later, both with the amount and the quality of his work and with his energy for presenting it. Early on, the quest was to find a way to make meaningful and beautiful films with a minimum of resources—in Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs at Happiness Jacobs perfected one of the most anti-Hollywood aesthetics imaginable (though he did help to nurture Jack Smith, who soon became an avant-garde star, and in time a Queer star as well). By the end of the 1960s Jacobs was making quiet, meditative films, including the lovely Soft Rain, a rumination on cinematic space and on the idea that cinema is fundamentally an urban medium, and Nissan Ariana Window, his paean to his young daughter and to his ever-supportive partner, Flo Jacobs.

            By the 1970s, Jacobs was immersed in an investigation, on one hand, of the early history of cinema, and on the other, of the potential of 3-D. His fascination with a 1905 Biograph short became the subject of a deep visual investigation in Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969, revised 1971) and Jacobs has remained fascinated with the moving-image work produced just before and during the early decades of cinema (see for example,Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896). His fascination with 3-D, an outgrowth of the nineteenth century interest in stereoscopic photography, led to a series of shadowplays, developed during his early years as a professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and performed by Binghamton students; then to what came to be called Nervous System Performances—in-depth, 3-D explorations of early films, using a two-projector system Jacobs invented. His embracing of digital technology has led to astonishing in-depth investigations of particular stereopticon photographs (Capitalism: Slavery, for example), and to such eye- and space-bending works as Flo Rounds a Corner.

            This program of short films might remind us of Hemingway’s famous metaphor for his writing style: “The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” The 7 films in this program are certainly evidence of Jacobs’s ever-evolving vision, but they are at best an infinitesimal sign of a remarkable, ever more prolific, contribution to modern cinema and modern art.

 This is the program:

Saturday, March 7th at  2PM, ATLAS 100

BLONDE COBRA
1963. 33min. Color and B&W. Sound. 16mm

LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS
1960. 15min. Color. Sound. 16mm

SOFT RAIN
1968. 12min. Color. Silent. 16mm

NISSAN ARIANA WINDOW
1969. 14min. Silent. 16mm

OPENING THE 19TH CENTURY: 1896
1991. 9min. B&W. Sound. 16mm

CAPITALISM: SLAVERY
2006. 3min. Color. Silent. (4:3 SD-BluRay)

FLO ROUNDS A CORNER
1999. 6min. Silent. (4:3 SD-BluRay)