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!