Ken Jacobs: Featuring Jack Smith and a Found Film

KEN JACOBS PROGRAMME I: FEATURING JACK SMITH AND A FOUND FILMThese notorious and wonderful groundbreaking early films by Ken Jacobs are being offered as a companion program to IFFR’s presentation of Star Spangled To Death.”The Whirled” and “Little Stabs at Happiness” are telling time capsules, breakouts, formally innovative- premeditated and impromptu – rarely seen true to life pictures of life on earth. And of course “Blonde Cobra” is in every sense of the word a “showstopper.”This program incredibly rich in it’s own right here serves as a kind of introductory guide and warm up to the Jacobean drama of the towering Star Spangled To Death, introducing some of the “stars” of Jacobs’ mercurial (think alternative to “Mercury Theater”) “stock players”. The most winning losers -the all too human Jerry Sims and Jack Smith are glimpsed here. Jack Smith known for his legendary(unrecorded!)performance pieces -evanescent marathons (what a concept!) wonderlands of disorientation ripe with “the exoticism of the everyday” and indelible films “Flaming Creatures” and Normal Love”. Smith plays up a storm in Jacobs’ playtime productions and here, shines in front of Jacobs’ camera as an equal to the Pan like Chaplin or the augustly gifted -as- mangled- Lon Chaney.Apart from all that these films are some of the most delightful musicals and lessons in constructive nihilism you will ever see on earth. Jacobs’s films stake out a territory for deep feeling,deep exploration and meaningful personal scale revolt. Offering both poison and antidotes filled with venom and vigor, empathy and invention these films are recommended for the faint of heart and for those pinned between world weariness and the lust for life. [M.M.] THE WHIRLED Featuring Jack Smith1. Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956)2. Little Cobra Dance (1956)3. Hunch Your Back (1963)4. Death Of P’Town 16mm., color and b&w, silent and sound, 20 min. The first two shorts were shot around Jack’s loft on Reade Street on two 100′ rolls in an impromptu way very different from my initial fastidious art-film approach.In 1963 a snatch of Saturday Afternoon….was shown on TV when I was somehow invited to participate in a TV quiz program called Hunch Your Back. (Back Your Hunch?) After years of shooting my raging epic Star Spangled To Death starring Jack as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and after a few months of being on the outs with each other, we got together for one last stab at friendship and at another film in Provincetown, Summer [K.J.]Little Stabs At Happiness (1959-63) 16mm, color, sound, 15 min. Featuring Jack Smith00′ rolls timed well with music on old 78’s. I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialized with dramatics.[K.J.]Blonde Cobra (1959-63) 16mm, color and b&w, sound, 33 minsFeaturing Jack Smith.* Images gathered by Bob Fleischner, sound-film composed by Ken Jacobs. BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative -no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for convenience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950’s, 40’s, 30s disgust. [K.J.]plusPERFECT FILM 1986 black and white, sound 21 _ mins