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.