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

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Ken Jacobs - Let There Be Whistleblowers & Ontic Antics Starring
Originally a Nervous System work (presented live using a special film-projection contrivance that wife Flo and I would set up). The 1929 Laurel and Hardy short Berth Marks, filmed twice, with and without sound, is our glorious take-off point. In some ways

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Average: 3.5 (4 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Self-published
Ken Jacobs - Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son & A Tom Tom Chaser
Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. Preservation of their memory ceases at the edges of the frame. One face passes "behind" another on the two-dimensional screen. Seven infinitely complex cine-tapestries indicate a narrat

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Average: 3 (2 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Self-published
Ken Jacobs: 3 features and a short
This boxed-set DVD anthology brings together three of legendary filmmaker Ken Jacobs' major recent works. Jacobs explores depth perception and the act of viewing through the application of digital effects and 3D techniques to archival films.

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Average: 2.7 (3 votes)
Category:
DVD
Publisher:
Electronic Arts Intermix
A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers
A Critical Cinema 3 continues Scott MacDonald's compilation of personal interviews and public discussions with major contributors to independent filmmaking and film awareness."A Critical Cinema 3 continues Scott MacDonald's compilation of personal interviews and public discussions with major contributors to independent filmmaking and film awareness. An informative exchange with Amos Vogel, whose Cinema 16 Society drew American filmgoers into a broader sense of film history, is followed by interviews reflecting a wide range of approaches to filmmaking.

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Category:
Books
Publisher:
University of California Press
Ken Jacobs in 3 Dimensions!

By Marcos Ortega on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 16:39
Ken Jacobs in 3 Dimensions!
May 13-19. Book launch May 14th
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003

As the 3-D craze continues to sweep through our nation’s multiplexes, we here at Anthology have seen fit to focus attention on an artist – one of the giants of avant-garde cinema – who has been exploring the possibilities of three-dimensional filmmaking since long before Hollywood dusted the process off and rebooted it for the purposes of high-powered distraction. Ken Jacobs’s experiments with the possibilities of illusionary depth stretch all the way back to the late 1960s, and in the last decade he has devoted himself to exploring the phenomenon, creating dozens of moving-image works, both shorts and features, that utilize various methods of producing three-dimensional effects. Standing in stark contrast to Hollywood’s efforts to squeeze some (any) kind of response out of jaded moviegoers benumbed by decades of big-budget spectacles, Jacobs’s profound fascination with the idea of filmic depth speaks to a commitment to expand our senses and our conception of the movie-watching experience – a conviction that the cinema can foster expanded perception, not just sensation.

This series offers a very rare chance to experience an exhilarating variety of Ken Jacobs’s utterly original 3-D work. Featuring three nights of live Nervous Magic Lantern performances, a revival of a 35mm slide-based piece from the mid-1980s, and a host of short and feature-length 3-D pieces from throughout his career, these shows will survey a body of work which forms a conception of 3-D filmmaking undreamed of in the multiplexes!
Category:
Events
Indiscretions - Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism
Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory.
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Average: 1 (1 vote)
Category:
Books
Publisher:
Indiana University Press
Close-up: Histories of the Avant-Garde Part IV

By Marcos Ortega on Tue, 26/01/2010 - 18:00
Close-up: Histories of the Avant-Garde Part IV
February 23th 2009, 20h
The Working Men’s Club, 44-46 Pollard Row, E2 6NB, London. Ticket: £5/£3 Close-Up members
Doors open at 7.45 pm
Presented by Close-Up and The Dog Movement

Five American masters all explore dailiness, film as a stage for performance, and most importantly the possibilities of using music with equal importance to image in tonight’s screening.
Category:
Events
Cinémathèque française: Ken Jacobs performance

By Marcos Ortega on Fri, 08/01/2010 - 07:35
Cinémathèque française: Ken Jacobs performance
Saturday, January 16th 2010, Salle Henri Langlois
51, rue de Bercy, 75012 Paris, France

Major artist of the experimental scene in New York, Ken Jacobs is the author of numerous films, including Tom Tom the Piper's Son, an exploration of a film from 1905, and the pamphlet on U.S. policy after the war, Star Spangled to Death.

Along with his movies, Ken Jacobs has created a significant number of performances under the banner of what he's called 'The Nervous System'. Ken Jacobs invents his own instruments and manipulates the projection during the performance. He creates rhythmic effects, getting a depth or relief never achieved before. His performances challenge traditional perceptions of time, space and image, disrupting and disorienting the viewer.

Ken Jacobs in the preamble to his performance will present a 3D movie made from images of one of the pioneers of cinema, Louis Aimé Augustin Leprince (1842-1890): Gift of Fire. Nineteen Obscure Frames That Changed The World.
Category:
Events
Deconstructing Cinema in Order to Reveal It

By Marcos Ortega on Sat, 10/10/2009 - 15:03
Mahnola Dargis writes about Ken Jacobs' cinema in The New York Times.
Category:
Brief news
Menken, Jacobs, selected for film preservation

By Marcos Ortega on Thu, 27/12/2007 - 19:49
The Library of Congress (USA) has announced its National Film Registry selections for the year 2007. Among the 25 films selected for preservation for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant are experimental classics Marie Menken's Glimpse of the Garden (1957) and Ken Jacobs' Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71). Last year's selection included the films Early Abstractions #1-5,7,10 (Harry Smith, 1939-56) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, 1971-72).

Glimpse of the Garden (1957)
Though Marie Menken’s volatile marriage to Willard Mass served as the inspiration for playwright Edward Albee in his 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” her surprisingly joyful and simple films rate among the more accessible works of avant-garde filmmakers. The beautifully lyrical “Glimpse of the Garden” is a serendipitous visual tour of a flower garden set to a soundtrack of bird calls.

Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71)
Ken Jacobs’ landmark avant-garde film reverently re-photographs an early cinema short of the fairy tale song to explore the parameters of film art. A “structuralist film” masterpiece, Jacobs uses techniques ranging from slow and studied examinations of individual paper print images to probing experiments in manipulation of motion and light.
Category:
General news