Ken, Flo and the Nervous Magic Lantern
In this 6th edition of (S8), we are celebrating: this year Ken Jacobs will be the special guest together with his invaluable life and work partner Flo. Beyond his undeniable importance in film history, Jacobs embodies an old artistic research that has kept him at the forefront of avant-garde cinema since he started his career in the late ’50s to nowadays. A career that (S8) will show through a retrospective program that will collect some of his most representative films (in collaboration with the CGAI), two unique performances with his Nervous Magic Lantern and a masterclass.
Besides being an essential filmmaker whose films have been shown at the Berlinale, the film festivals of London, Hong Kong, New York, the Whitney Museum and MoMA, and spotlighed in retrospectives at the Rotterdam film festival, Vila do Conde and the Anthology Film Archives (this is only a summary of a long list), Jacobs has received numerous awards, including the Maya Deren Award and grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among many others. He has also been a film activist: he was an important figure at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and at the legendary underground cinema in Bleecker Street, his own house becoming an alternative screening room. It was the first place where Kuchar brothers screened their 8mm movies, for example. In 1966 he founded with Flo the Millennium Film Workshop, and co-founded one of the first university film departments of his country, at Binghamton University. He has also been an influential teacher for critics, programmers and filmmakers such as Steve Anker, Alan Berliner, Amy Halpern, Jim Hoberman, Ken Ross and Phil Solomon, among many others.
Jacobs, born in New York, studied painting with Hans Hofmann and began his career in the 1960s thriving underground scene among beat writers, pop artists and abstract expressionists. Meeting filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton (a begginer at the time) contributed to consolidate Jacob’s interest in cinema –medium in which he had been working from a long time before–, and his friendship with Jack Smith gave birth to some of the essential experimental postwar films (becoming one of the figures of that extraordinary league included in the legendary book Visionary Film by P. Adams Sitney). As result of his friendship with Smith we can find –in the early 1960s– movies like Little Stabs at Happiness, The Whirled and Blonde Cobra (according to Jonas Mekas “the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema”), which we could see in one of the sessions at (S8).
Jack Smith in Little Stabs at Happyness
After these films, where Jack Smith’s hectic monologue and histrionics have an important presence, Jacobs also focuses on a more intimate film (that is the case of Nissan Ariana Window) where perception is explored in relation to his everyday life, as we can see for example in Window.
But his way does not end there, and from the early 70’s Jacobs, maybe influenced by his painting background, starts to emerge. Vision, depth perception, light and movement, that is, film qualities, he takes advantage of them in one of his most famous films –an appropriation masterpiece– Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969 -71), in which 10 minutes of a film of 1905 become a two-hour journey into the essence of cinema. And it is also an example of one of the most crucial elements of his work, appropriation and deconstruction, mainly of fragments of early cinema, as seen in films like Globe (1969) where he experiments with 3D.
Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896
With the advent of video and digital cinema, Ken Jacobs has continued with his experimental work, and has also expanded it thanks to the possibilities of the new world. Whether with own or another’s material he has experimented with what he calls “cyclopean 3D”: three-dimensionality that can be seen with one eye. He has also dug incisively into the recent history of the United States, putting his finger on the sore spot of capitalism and racism in the movies of this century, where he shows that his visual cinema is not incompatible with a strong political commitment.
The experiential and performative side of cinema is also crucial for Jacobs. His performances, very well-known by the use of a device of his own creation called Nervous Magic Lantern –he will bring it to A Coruña for two unique performances–, combine his own experiments with a wink to the phantasmagoria of early cinema and to the magic lantern. Thus he creates an illusory and immersive three-dimensional world that has been described as “a mixture of jam session, shadow theater and hypnosis.” In A Coruña Jacobs will show a film without film, turning –before our eyes and with various instruments and handmade collages– the light of the projector into unforgettable visual phenomena that sticks in audience’s mind.
In order to complete the participation of Ken Jacobs at (S8), he will also give a masterclass (on Saturday June 6) under the title “We’re in The Hectic Subway And I Say to Flo,”We’re Rich!”, Meaning in Sensations”, where he will explain how he went from Abstract Expressionism and Hans Hofmann’s teachings to his film practice and 3D experiments.
Complete programme and schedule (S8) 2015
The complete programme and schedule of (S8) 6th Mostra de Cinema Periférico is already available in our website. We are also delighted to present this year’s image of the festival, in which the patterns and ondulations make reference to the streets of the country protagonist of this edition: Brazil.
The patterns and shapes that this year make up (S8) image are not casual, as they have a link with the country which is the centre stage: Brazil. For Brazilian people building their identity –brasilidade– is a living process that somehow has been entrusted to artists. Far away from Brazil, the one portrayed in the tourist brochures, in the vastness of the largest country in South America, there lies a lush and self-sufficient cultural activity. Here we find a group of filmmakers for whom celluloid is a tool and not a fad, which blooms in selvas do concreto that are the Brazilian cities: this is where the film paradise is spread, which would have been impossible to find if it had been searched in tropical jungles and beaches. A creative kaleidoscope formed by the amalgamation of sensations and references, the cultural mix and the fresh air of an imaginary still under construction.
It is here where shapes and patterns come. What unites such a large country is precisely the ground that is walked on, overrun by undulating mosaics, which like the capital they built –Brasilia, an attempt to model their identity in concrete from scratch–, shows the ability of Brazilian people to find plasticity in what is stiff. Thus, the name of one of the program of this year devoted to the new Brazilian filmmakers, Paraíso do Concreto, summarizes (S8) program of this year: from these new filmmakers to the historical Brazilian avant-garde of Veja o Brasil, the Paulista filmmaker Marcos Bertoni, who stands up for recycling and super 8 found footage among what the city rejects, Paula Gaitán’s construction of identity through her own memories and the retrofuture of Distruktur, a Brazilian duo living in Berlin (a city that had to be reinvented and rebuilt). Somehow it connects with the guest of honor of this year: Ken Jacobs, from another concrete jungle, New York, port of entry into the New World (North), and part of a country whose identity has been built on celluloid for the last 120 years. An invention of cinema (which also includes its own reinvention and breaking of forms) in which he has been a participant since late 50s. As part of the invention of the avant-garde cinema was the city, twisted and shaped by the power of creativity of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which opens the festival with a recently restored version.
Paraíso do concreto lands in A Coruña. And the new films made in Galicia –to be seen in Sinais– welcome it. And paradoxically it often looks like a forest more than a city.
Brasilidade não é saudade: Brasil Special in the (S8)
First we were taken by Argentina, then by Japan. But this year, as we wanted to return to warmer latitudes, the (S8) goes into the thick jungle, the Brazilian experimental cinema, and brings a film selection from the 20s until today, some of the most exciting film events of that country.
Límite, by Mário Peixoto
From the very beginning, the special focus in Brazil starts with a program developed by the researcher and film historian Lila Foster -who has worked at Cinemateca Brasileira- who gives a reading of the Brazilian film history seen from the avant-garde. Maluco é Mágico (1927, William Schocair), is an amazing futuristic and subversive film on an island populated by the strangest people in the world. Limite (1931) is the only movie by the writer Mario Peixoto, a cult film of overwhelming beauty and poetic understanding ahead of its time and which Eisenstein and Welles liked too. There could also be seen Veja o Brasil. Macumba (1950), by Alceu Maynard, belonging to the series of ethnographic cinegraphies, which portrays the mix of Christianity and African religious practices occurring in Brazil. It will be followed by Humberto Mauro’s film, one of the most important Brazilian filmmakers of the early twentieth century, who built from a popular song, “A Velha a Fiar”, a work that goes from Costumbrismo to the rhythmic edition of images that play with composition, stop motion, collage and humor. The program also shows two important movements of Brazilian cinema: first, the Cinema Novo, with Patio (1959), the first film by the legendary Glauber Rocha, and (1966), Fala Brasilia by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and on the other hand, the so-called Cinema da Boca do Lixo with a film by one of the main names, Rogério Sganzerla: Documentario, photographed by Andrea Tonacci, a short film that gauges the pulse of the political situation of the country at the time with the narrative freedom and the documentary touch of the new cinema of the sixties.
A revolução das massas, by Marcos Bertoni
The presence of Marcos Bertoni is undoubtedly one of the surprises of the program devoted to Brazil. Bertoni, a Brazilian super 8 hero, an unclassifiable film outsider known by international audiences in some way thanks to his role in the award-winning movie Avanti Popolo, by Michael Wahrmann, where he has a leading part. From his early works in super 8 –in the seventies- among which there can be found films such as an unbiased remake of the blockbuster Cleopatra and short films where political criticism is mixed with humor, to his radical parody of the Danish Dogma, Dogma 2002, whose motto is: “Filming, editing, dubbing is not allowed. Always in Super 8…”. A universe in which there are sharp visions of the dictatorship, ironic gazes at the invasion of new churches in Brazil and the enigmatic frame invasion of a being from another world.
Memória da Memória, by Paula Gaitán
In A Coruña we will also meet Paula Gaitán, an outstanding filmmaker whose work has been seen at the Viennale, IndieLisboa, Bafici, Tribeca and Reina Sofía Museum, among others. Gaitán, who was involved with Glauber Rocha, offers an interesting look on home footage and filmed diary. Rocha himself, who can be felt in her films, is a key figure in one of her most famous and awarded movies, Diario de Sintra. Here we will have the opportunity to see one of her most recent films Memória da Memória, a film-essay built with her own images in super 8 whose title deals with one of the fascinating walking paths she follows: the recording of the protagonists’ reaction to the filmed memory and its meaning over time. Gaitán will also offer, after the film, a special screening of a selection of super 8 works.
Traveler Heart, by Distruktur
The current picture of the Brazilian experimental film will close the tour around this thriving and operating filmmaking. The S8 Contemporary section will bring to A Coruña the Brazilian duo Distruktur, based in Berlin, whose work has been seen at festivals such as Berlin, Torino, Moscow and Curta Cinema in Rio de Janeiro, as well as at institutions such as the New Museum in New York, the Paço das Artes in São Paulo, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Vilnius. The films and performances by Melissa Dullius and Gustavo Jahn, members of the duo Distruktur, touch the possible paths of fiction, suggesting -through their powerful imagination- elusive narratives to be built by the viewer. In addition to a session dedicated to their films, one of the nights of (S8) Overflows at Fundación Luis Seoane will be dedicated to one of their performances, with screenings and live music performed by the duo itself.
Child World, by duo Strangloscope
Finally, to complete this review of the present, there could also be seen films by the most outstanding representatives of the new generation of Brazilian filmmakers, such as, among others, Ana Vaz (whose last film has just been released at Ann Arbor), the programmer and filmmaker Gustavo Beck, who will also be in A Coruna, as well as the Strangloscope duo, Claudia Cádenas and Rafael Schlichting, which will bring their refreshing approach to our city.