KEN JACOBS & BOB FLEISCHNER
Thursday 5 November 1998, at 9:00pm
London Lux Centre

Ken Jacobs’ films developed out of despair and desperation, and were an attempt to make an urban guerrilla cinema in reaction to his disappointment with the “wall to wall colour stupidity” of early avant-garde art cinema. After growing up in Brooklyn, he spent some time working as a coastguard off the coast of Alaska and on returning to New York, he began to make Orchard Street (1956), a documentary about the Lower East Side. He then embarked on a series of films with Jack Smith as his leading actor, commencing with Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice: TV Plug: Little Cobra Dance (1957) before embarking upon a three hour epic titled Star Spangled To Death (1957-60). This film, which is concerned with the aesthetic of failure and collapse of order, incorporates new material with found footage. It occupied Jacobs for the next three years. After cutting it down to a ninety minute version for a benefit screening in 1964, he is still promising to restore it to its full length. During this period, using the pseudonym K.M. Rosenthal to “protect my obscurity”, he completed the wonderful Little Stabs At Happiness (1958-60), a series of whimsical 100’ rolls presented as they came out of the camera. During the summer of 1961, Jacobs and Smith spent time in Provincetown performing The Human Wreckage Review, which anticipated many of the artists’ happenings of later that decade and was closed down by the police. The Death of P’Town (1961) was made at this time.

In 1960, Bob Fleischner gave Ken some unedited and abandoned footage of Jack Smith and Jerry Sims picking their way through a desolate apartment space. From this material Jacobs assembled Blonde Cobra (1959-63), adding taped monologues by Smith and several long passages of black leader. It is an incredible film which constantly defeats its own continuity through its method of construction.

BLONDE COBRA
Ken Jacobs & Bob Fleischner, USA, 1959-63, 16mm, b/w, sound, 33 min

“Jack says I made the film too heavy. It was his and Bob’s intention to make a light monster-movie comedy. Two comedies actually, two separate stories that were being shot simultaneously until they had a falling out over who should pay for the raw stock destroyed in a fire that started when Jack’s cat knocked over a candle; Jack claimed it was an act of God. In the winter of ‘59 blue Bob showed me the footage. Having no idea of the original story plans I was able to view the material not as the exquisite fragments of a failure, of two failures, but as the makings of a new entity. Bob gave over the footage to me and with it the freedom to develop it as I saw fit.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

“Blonde Cobra, undoubtedly, is the masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema, and it is a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy. I think it is one of the great works of personal cinema, so personal that it is ridiculous to speak of ‘author’s’ cinema. I know that the larger public will misinterpret and misunderstand these films. As there are poets appreciated only by other poets, so there is now a cinema for the few, too terrible and too ‘decadent’ for an ‘average’ man in any organised culture. But then, if everybody would dig Beaudelaire, or de Sade, or Burroughs, my God, where would humanity be?” (Jonas Mekas on The Baudelairean Cinema, Village Voice Movie Journal, 1963)

Ken Jacobs didn’t dig the Baudelairean tag and made the fantasy home movie Baud’lairian Capers (1963-64) in response. It forms part of a loose trilogy with The Winter Footage (1963-64) and The Sky Socialist (1964-65).

BAUD’LAIRIAN CAPERS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1963-64, 16mm, b/w, silent, 20 min

“Jonas Mekas jumped the gun, celebrating the arrival of a ‘Baudelairean Cinema’ with Bob Fleischner and myself subsumed within the category, that is, obscured beneath the dark cloak of Jack Smith. Bob had filmed Blonde Cobra, I had composed it (and more), but from Jack’s ‘stuff’, respectful of his fantasy. I’ve had to wonder if Jonas’ unwillingness to help bankroll my earlier and more ambitious Star Spangled To Death might’ve been because it was so involved with historical (Jews!) and political matter so thumpingly non-Baudelairean that it would’ve confused his simplistic take, and selling point, for ‘Underground Cinema’. That Bob, a pleasant amiable Bronx boy might be so construed, as Baudelairean, was nuts. Prompting me, in going from a portrait of Jack to one of Bob, to ironically attach that title, with the telling contra-subtitle, A Musical With Nazis And Jews. And at that time in the USA, ‘Jews’ was as uncomfortable a public utterance as I suspect in Britain today. You’ve got a homeboy in the film by the way – your poet Harry Fainlight (in the one scene accompanied by sound). It was Harry’s shockingly tasteless idea to film ‘the revenge of Anne Frankenstein’. Appalling, but the idea stayed with me, modified by me, entering this film and largely amplified in my next, the feature-length The Sky Socialist.” (statement by Ken Jacobs, 1998)

Bob Fleischner worked on many of Ken Jacobs’ early films and had shot the original Blonde Cobra footage. In 1965 he made Grandma’s House, a labour of love featuring Jerry Sims. In the film, Sims returns to haunt his grandmother’s house in Coney Island where he discovers his dream girl, played by Barbara Kahn, and is faced with the possibility of giving up his life of doom. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Fleischner made a number of brief portrait poems including Max’s Shirt (1975), Paradise (1978) and Sally’s Window (1982).

GRANDMA’S HOUSE
Bob Fleischner, USA, 1965, 16mm, b/w, sound, 25 min

“Very high. Bob understood his star’s tortured moodiness, schlepped the boardwalk with him and bought him lunches, cheered him up with imitations of Lugosi while solidly, stolidly, cine-drop by drop recording the elements of this most tender but utter horror story. Grandma’s House is so true, believed, unaffected and straight forward in its image-locked-into-image narrative delivery it’s embarrassing. Like Chaplin in Monsieur Verdoux, Fleischner employs the simplest and most direct means to convey his emotions, to tell the story. He’s out to impress us, not with how facile he can be, but with a sad hard fact that’s beset him and which we must now face and live with forever.” (Ken Jacobs on Grandma’s House, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

After completing the feature-length narrative The Sky Socialist (1964-65), which in its cinematography investigates depth and the perception of space, Jacobs began to develop a keen interest in the manipulation of light. For projection of the 8mm film Naomi Is A Vision Of Loveliness (1965), he used a variable projector and distorting lenses. The next year, he began to present live shadow plays starting with The Big Blackout of ‘65: Chapter One “Thirties Man” (1965), which negated the need for camera or projector. The shadow plays continued to develop in two and three dimensions through the next two decades and included the wonderfully named Ken Jacobs At The Console Performing “Stick To Your Carpentry And You Won’t Get Nailed” (1979). In 1964, he utilised a more formal approach to cinema and made Window, in which he proposed the room as a camera and the window as the aperture. Similar ideas were later investigated in Airshaft (1967), a fixed camera looking through a fire escape, and Soft Rain (1968), a window view that is partially obscured by a paper rectangle which confuses the spatial structure of the frame.

SOFT RAIN
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1968, colour, silent, 12 min

“A large black rectangle following up and filling to space above the stage-area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage, or more properly as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly, if slightly, overlaps the two receding loft building walls, the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles). So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is amusingly and mysteriously explicit.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

Jacobs then made the definitive collage film Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969) by reediting and rephotographing a ten minute short made in Hollywood in 1905. He transposed the timing, scale and sequence of the original by refilming close-ups from a screen, using filters, making loops and retarding the narrative, to make his own film nearly two hours in length. That same year he made Globe (1969), his first truly 3D film which is viewed through special Eye Opener filters.

GLOBE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1971, 16mm, colour, sound, 22 min

“Previously titled Excerpt From The Russian Revolution. Normal projection. Flat image (of snowbound suburban housing tract) blossoms into 3D only when viewer places Eye Opener (copyright 1987) before right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, centre seats are best. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.) The found sound is X-ratable (not for children or Nancy Reagan) but is important to the film’s perfect balance (Globe is symmetrical) of divine and profane.” (Ken Jacobs, New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #7, 1989)

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Ken devoted much of his time to teaching and to the development of his Nervous System projection unit. Two wonderful films he made during this period are The Doctor’s Dream (1978), a found television drama which was sequentially reedited, and Perfect Film (1986), the rushes of television news footage of vox pop interviews on the occasion of Malcolm X’s assassination, which was found in a dustbin and presented unaltered.

The Nervous System is a way of deriving 3D images from standard 2D film and was begun in 1975 with The Impossible: Chapter One “Southwark Fair”. Using two single-frame analytic projectors containing identical footage (usually found or archive material), Jacobs performs cinematic magic by controlling frame by frame advances and by flickering between the two machines to manipulate the viewer’s perceptions, appearing to present both forward and backward motion at the same time. It truly defies visual (and mental) comprehension. There are now twenty Nervous System pieces, including Two Wrenching Departures (1989), a tribute to Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner. The latest is called Ontic Antics Starring Laurel And Hardy (1998) and was recently premiered at the New York Film Festival.

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