Experimental Tuesdays: Ken Jacobs — Looking Forward to a World without Money 

Ken Jacobs, one of the true radicals of American cinema and a lion of experimental film, passed October 5th, a mere season since his beloved wife and collaborator Flo preceded him. They lived long, full, beautiful lives. In addition to his inimitable work in film, video, painting, performance and all range of moving images, Ken started and was at the center of the film program at SUNY-Binghamton and co-founded The Millennium Film Workshop.

Often dense, visually-mesmerizing and powerfully constructed, his works engage deeply with visual processes, our phenomenological experiences of cinema and our considerable possibilities for perceptual dimension. The two works on celluloid—both from our own Cinema Arts Archive!—we’ll be showing this evening are true masterworks of found/appropriative/collage-brative film: Blond Cobra is made from two abandoned works by his friends, artists Bob Fleischner and Jack Smith, combined into a shimmering and lush film with a series of Brechtian disruptions and indeterminacies; Perfect Film is a “record of events literally preserved as found from the curving room floor; carelessly strung on a reel [and] and bought for $5 on Canal Street” depicting, demonstrating and becoming media in the immediate aftermath of the murder of Malcom X. In addition to these canonical works, we’ll be featuring digital works from this century, during which he continued to make mind-eye-boggling and spirited art that feels as fresh, as daring and as radical as anything he made over seventy years of filmmaking.

Note: these works often stroboscopic and flickering images.