Tags: Ken Jacobs

Ken Jacobs

Ken Jacobs (born May 25 1933) is an American experimental filmmaker. He is the director of (1969, USA), which was admitted to the National Film Registry in 2007, and Star Spangled to Death (2004, USA), a nearly seven hour film comprised largely of found footage.

Nationality:

United States

Tagged content

Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye

By Marcos Ortega on Mon, 18/03/2013 - 18:33
Conversations at the Edge: Wavelengths, in the blink of an eye
Thursday, March 21 2013, 18h
Gene Siskel Film Center
164 N. State, Chicago, IL, USA
Curator Andréa Picard in person

Named for but also infinitely inspired by Michael Snow’s 1967 masterpiece, Wavelength, the Toronto International Film Festival’s avant-garde program presents films and videos that defy convention, suggest alternate ways of thinking, and sometimes re-emerge from a distant past in order to comment on the present. Curated by Andréa Picard, who has curated Wavelengths since 2006, this program is a Wavelengths compendium featuring a number of works from the 2012 line-up (including Nathaniel Dorsky’s August and After, Ernie Gehr’s Auto-Collider XV and Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan’s View from the Acropolis which were all cited in the New York Times’ best films of the year wrap-up and screen as Chicago premieres) and highlights from previous editions, including a 35mm restored print from La Cinémathèque française of Henri Storck’s too-rarely seen 1929 Surrealist gem, Pour vos beaux yeux. Blinking is not encouraged!
Category:
Events
Xcèntric: Political matters

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 05/02/2013 - 09:31
Xcèntric: Political matters
Thursday, February 7, 20h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

Political reality is frequently limited to a more documentary or realistic register. This programme presents different contemporary approaches to politics and the corrosive effects of capitalism, from the viewpoint of the sensitive, formalist abstraction of the visual material itself: the clandestine night-time recording of Afghan and Iraqi refugees at the camp at Sangatte, France (Border); the crushing of cars at the end of the consumer cycle (Chevelle); protests against austerity measures in Athens (Austerity Measures), and the political commentary of Ken Jacobs on the decline of capitalism.

- Border (Laura Waddington, 2004, video, 27 min)
- Chevelle (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2012, 35 mm, 7 min)
- Austerity Measures (Guillaume Cailleau & Ben Russell, 2012, 16 mm, 8 min)
- Seeking the Monkey King (Ken Jacobs, 2011, Blu-ray, 39 min)
Category:
Events
Xcèntric: Found footage / re-enactment

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 11/12/2012 - 08:16
Xcèntric: Found footage / re-enactment
Museum's films: the Pompidou Collection
Thursday December 13, 2012, 20h
Xcèntric CCCB, Montalegre, 5, 08001 Barcelona

Programme two in the selection from the film collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou, with three high priests of the experimental sharing the screen in a session not to be missed.

- Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1937, 17 min)
- Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (Ken Jacobs, 1990, 9 min)
- Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963, 42 min)
Category:
Events
Glorious Catastrophes

By Marcos Ortega on Wed, 12/09/2012 - 16:06
Glorious Catastrophes
Wednesday, 31 October 2012, 20:30h
Beursschouwburg, A. Ortsstraat 20-28, 1000 Brussels
In collaboration with Courtisane

“A seriousness that fails”: this is how Susan Sontag described the essence of “camp”, this transient mixture of excess, fantasy, passion and naivety that has taken up a distinctive place in the cultural firmament since the 1960’s. Andy Warhol, who emphatically responded to this trend with his film Camp (1965), saw it differently: he was rather interested in the idea of failure itself, a failure that has to be taken seriously. After all the majority of Warhol’s films consists of observations of people in and as image, who in all their fallibility reveal a genuine authenticity and startling vulnerability. Two characters who play lead roles in Camp also take up a central place in this film programme: Paul Swan and Jack Smith. Warhol’s self-titled portrait of Swan, a dancer and actor who was once lauded as the “most beautiful man in the world” is an as ruthless as affectionate observation of a man who alternately falls in and out of the role of his lifetime. The area of tension between playing and being, playful fantasy and harsh reality, is also the arena of Jack Smith, the “enfant terrible” of the post war American underground scene. The early films Smith made in collaboration with his then confidant Ken Jacobs manifest a brutal beauty and audacious hedonism, unleashing a bewildering vitality not despite but because of their deliberate “trash” esthetics. Between innocence and nonsense, order and disorder, catastrophe and utopia: what the films in this programme have in common, are forms of expression that thrive in relation to their own failing.

With film works by Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith
Category:
Events
Ken Jacobs - Tom Tom The Piper's Son
Rephotographing a 1905 Biograph one-reeler, Jacobs penetrates ever deeper into the image, delving into the shot, zooming in on details, probing and probing.

Rating:

Average: 2 (1 vote)

Price:
40.00 EUR
Category:
VHS
Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs has been making cinema for more than fifty years. Along with over thirty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, sound pieces, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about moving images. He is part of the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, and his work has been celebrated in Europe and the U.S. While his importance is well-recognized, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to him.
Rating:

Average: 3.5 (2 votes)
Category:
Books
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Ken Jacobs - Star Spangled to Death
STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH is an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict.

Rating:

Average: 3 (2 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Self-published
Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986
Treasures IV presents works by 27 filmmakers, from Bruce Baillie to Andy Warhol, who changed cinema in the decades following World War II. The line-up reads like a who\'s who of the avant-garde world and includes films by luminaries such as Stan Brakhage

Rating:

Average: 3.2 (5 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
National Film Preservation Foundation
Ken Jacobs - New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903
Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Ken Jacobs is one of the truly legendary figures in the New York Underground. Artist, filmmaker, inventor, theatrical innovator and teacher—Ken Jacobs has been questioning and reinventing new film techniques for well over five de

Rating:

Average: 2 (1 vote)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Olivia Boudreau
Ken Jacobs - Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise
One of the most consistently experimental and prolific filmmakers in Avant Garde Cinema, Ken Jacobs has produced enough work for several lifetimes, and continues on stronger than ever into his seventh decade. From film and shadow play to magic lantern and

Rating:

Average: 3.3 (4 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Olivia Boudreau