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click on a program number to see complete descriptions.
PROGRAM 1
To the Happy Few (Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, Germany, 2002; 4m)
The Trickle Down Theory of Sorrow (Mary Filippo, U.S., 2003; 15m)
--- ------- (Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, U.S., 1966-67; 11m)
( ) (Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003; 21m)
What Goes Up (Robert Breer, U.S., 2003; 4 ½ m)
Meditations on Revolution V: Foreign City (Robert Fenz, U.S., 2003; 32m)
Total running time: 87 ½ m
Sat Oct 18: 1.00
PROGRAM 2: MICHELE SMITH
Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive (U.S., 2003; 23m)
They Say (U.S., 2003; 48m)
Total running time: 71m
Sat Oct 18: 4:00
PROGRAM 3: JONAS MEKAS
Travel Songs 1967-1981 (U.S., 2003; 28m)
The Song of Assisi (1967; 2m)
The Song of Avila (1967; 4m)
The Song of Moscow (1970; 3m)
The Song of Stockholm (1980; 4m)
The Song of Italy (1967; 15m)
Quartet No. 1 (U.S., 1993; 8m)
The Song of Avignon (U.S., 1998; 10m)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn (U.S., 1949-2003; 15m)
Total running time: 61m
Sat Oct 18: 7:00
PROGRAM 4
ORIFSO (Lis Rhodes, U.K., 1999; 13m)
Trauma Victim (Robert Todd, U.S., 2003; 17m)
Apollo (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan/U.S., 2003; 6m)
Duct and; Cover (Devon Damonte, U.S., 2003; 4m)
Secrets of Mexuality (Martha Colburn, Netherlands, 2003; 6m)
Person'na (Jennifer Debauche, Belgium, 2002; 16m)
PS When You Are Going To Die (Stom Sogo, Japan/U.S., 2003; 12m)
Total running time: 74m
Sat Oct 18: 9.00
PROGRAM 5
Loretta (Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2003; 4m)
Chinese Series (Stan Brakhage, Canada, 2003; 2m)
If Only (Fred Worden, U.S., 2003; 7½m)
Polymer (Courtney Hoskins & Carl Fuermann, U.S., 2003; 25 secs)
I Began To Wish (Julie Murray, U.S., 2003; 5m)
The Galilean Satellites (Courtney Hoskins, U.S., 2003; 26m)
Fl. Oz. (Julie Murray, U.S., 2003; 6m)
Elements (Jim Jennings, U.S., 2003; 6m)
Stan's Window & work in progress (Stan Brakhage, Canada, 2003; 13m)
Total running time: 70m
Sun Oct 19: 1:00
PROGRAM 6: KEN JACOBS
Star Spangled To Death
(U.S., 1957-2003; 375m)
Sun Oct 19
Part I (240m) 3:30pm
Intermission 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Part II (135m) 8:30pm
Please note special admission rates for Program 6 (Parts I & II): $15 general public, $12 Film Society members
above: to the happy few
PROGRAM 1
To the Happy Few (Thomas Draschan & Stella Friedrichs, Germany, 2002; 4m)
The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of
(fake) suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades from the Thirties (invisible woman) to the end of the 1980s. - Thomas Draschan
The Trickle Down Theory of Sorrow (Mary Filippo, U.S., 2003; 15m)
A film that situates and incriminates the filmmaker in the web of economic and social injustices of her culture. It is an experimental, autobiographical documentary about my being both the daughter of a working-class mother, and someone who has become (economically at least) middle-class and a mother herself.
The core of the film is an interview with my mother where she describes worker exploitation and gender discrimination in the jewelry factories she worked in during the Forties and Fifties in Rhode Island. I've connected and contrasted my experiences and attitudes toward work, class and gender roles, with my mother's. My mother's attitude toward the social injustices she describes is one of resignation. My attitude is one of assumed but uncollected responsibility. - Mary Filippo
--- ------- (Thom Andersen & Malcolm Brodwick, U.S., 1966-67; 11m)
A documentary about rock'n'roll. Making, buying, selling. Radio, jukebox, scopitone, pinball, poolhall. Canned Heat, City Lights, Seeds of Time, LA Tymes. Llyn Foulkes, Charlie Watts. Chris & Craig, Duke of Earl. Seeburg, Wurlitzer. Standing, walking, jumping, singing, dancing, gesturing, surfing. LAPD, LA County Sheriffs Dept., The Trip, The Lynch Bldg. Tops, Pandora's Box, Maverick's Flat, someone's backyard. California Music Co. Riot in cell block number nine, riot on sunset strip. Hot rod, coin slot, go cart, bomp club. Hound Dog Man, King Creole. Kim Weston, The Rainbows, The Shangri-Las, The Supremes, Earl-Jean. Stupid girl, 19th nervous breakdown. Bill Haley & The Comets: you can get no further back than that. Wolfman Jack, Ernie Bushmiller, Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, The Who, The Coasters. Great balls of fire. Standing at the crossroads of love. Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, John Cale, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Howlin Wolf, James Brown-The King. You can't catch me. Frankie Avalon, The Beatles, The Yardbirds. Wax reclamation, an early clue to the new direction. Mick Jagger/Earth Angel.
Documentary material organized by a predetermined structure. A sequence of
picture-sound equations with randomly chosen terms. Vertically, --- ------- is completely structured; horizontally it is completely random. A pastiche of cinematography, a parody of montage. 1:2. 3:7. Right, left. Right to left-left to right. Up-down. Stasis, motion. Orange, magenta. Yellow, blue. Red, green. Magenta, orange. Blue, yellow. Green, red. 1:2, 1,5:3, 2:4, 3:6, 5:10, 8:16 . . ." - Thom Andersen
above: ( )
( ) (Morgan Fisher, U.S., 2003; 21m)
The origin of ( ) was my fascination with inserts. Inserts are a crucial kind of shot in the syntax of narrative films. Inserts show newspaper headlines, letters, and similar sorts of significant details that have to be included for the sake of clarity in telling the story. I have long been struck by a quality of inserts that can be called the alien, and as well the alienated. Narrative films depend on inserts (it's a very rare film that has none) but at the same time they are utterly marginal. Inserts are far from the traffic in faces and bodies that are the heart of narrative films. Inserts have the power of the indispensable, but in the register of bathos. Inserts are above all instrumental. They have a job to do, and they do it; and they do little, if anything, else. Sometimes inserts are remarkably beautiful, but this beauty is usually hard to see because the only thing that registers is the news, the expository information, that the insert conveys. That's the unhappy ideal of the insert: you see only what it does, and not what it is. This of course is no more than the ideal of all the instruments of narrative filmmaking and the rules that govern their use.
So inserts are like all shots in a narrative film in that they are purely instrumental. But inserts embody this fact to the most extreme degree. If there is one kind of shot in a movie in which there is the least latitude for the exercise of expressive intelligence, it is the insert. This is so because all considerations in composing the shot must bend to the single imperative to make something clear. If there is a hierarchy in the prestige and glamour of the different kinds of shots in a narrative film, inserts are at the bottom. In the old days, the inserts were sometimes directed, if indeed that is the word, by someone other than the director. That is how little inserts matter as occasions for expression.
I wanted to make a film out of nothing but inserts, or shots that were close enough to being inserts, as a way of making them visible, to release them from their self-effacing performance of drudge-work, to free them from their servitude to story.
By chance I learned that the root of "parenthesis" is a Greek word that means the act of inserting. And so I was given the title of the film. - Morgan Fisher
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What Goes Up (Robert Breer, U.S., 2003; 4½m)
In observance of gravity - the airplane, the priapic flesh, the
deciduous leaf, the upturned nose, the kitten up a tree, the towering
Empire - All Must Fall. As a man who fell to earth Breer branches off
into playful tangents and bursts creating complex spaces cartwheeling
through time's latest seasons. Quick as a snapshot, hard as a slingshot,
lighter than a ton of feathers. - Mark McElhatten
Meditations on Revolution V: Foreign City (Robert Fenz, U.S., 2003; 32m)
The final film in Fenz's series "Meditations on Revolution." The film is
dedicated to the director's father who immigrated to the United States
in 1953 and passed away in 1999.
Foreign City studies New York as a place of immigration and
displacement. It is a meditation on revolution of the urban space. Its
abstract black-and-white images and actual sounds, come in and out of
synch, creating a magical foreign landscape. The reconstruction of N.Y.
through an imaginary city plan, built on sensation. The film has a
timeless, anonymous quality until it is given the voice of artist and
jazz musician Marion Brown. - Robert Fenz
Total running time: 87 ½ m;
Sat Oct 18: 1.00
PROGRAM 2: MICHELE SMITH
Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive (U.S., 2003; 23m)
They Say (U.S., 2003; 49m)
This new work consists of one film split into two parts. Two parts which can be seen in either order, or separately if one so chooses.
In Like All Bad Men He Looks Attractive the mixed mediums are woven together on mini DV. The materials are one reel of 35mm film, and two reels of 16mm film. Inset into the 35mm film are plastic shopping bags, translucent plastic folders and plates, mylar drafts used as blueprints for bridge construction, viewmaster slides, paparazzi slides found at a tourist memorabilia shop on Hollywood Boulevard (including Zsa Zsa Gabor, Charlton Heston and George Peppard with a big white rabbit), slides purchased in the gift shops at the Getty Museum and at the Hearst Castle, "sign here" tabs from my accountant, the wings of a dying butterfly that I tried to rescue from the hot pavement of a grocery store parking lot, Hollywood movie trailers, 8mm home movies and stag films, 16mm footage, including an episode of Green Acres, viewmaster stills from 1970s TV shows, etc. Some things were not inset into the reel but recorded in the same manner and later cut in digitally. Panels or film "carpets" made of 16mm film. Old magic lantern slides. The base film the elements are physically cut into is a workprint of raw footage of an unknown actor with a bandaged finger standing in front of the camera who occasionally raises an envelope and reacts to a clapboard. I received this reel of film from a friend who's a bit of a packrat (like myself). Before I met him, his house had burned down and this reel was one of the few items which survived. The decayed parts are where the emulsion melted from the heat.
- Michele Smith
Read the complete notes for Michele Smith's program here.
Total running time: 71m;
Sat Oct 18: 4:00
PROGRAM 3: JONAS MEKAS
Travel Songs 1967-1981: (U.S., 2003)
The Song of Assisi (1967; 2m)
The Song of Avila (1967; 4m)
The Song of Moscow (1970; 3m)
The Song of Stockholm (1980; 4m)
The Song of Italy (1967; 15m)
Quartet No. 1 (U.S., 1993; 8m)
The film doesn't have much to do with the form of what's known as the quartet. In 1991 I was despairing with the amount of unedited diaristic material that I had. I was searching for ways of dealing with it. This film is the result of my searching. - Jonas Mekas
above: williamsburg, brooklyn
Song of Avignon (U.S., 1998; 10m)
Dedicated to my 1966 trip to Avignon that helped me survive a deep crisis that I was going through. Texts from diaries of that period on the soundtrack are read by Angus MacLise. - Jonas Mekas
Williamsburg, Brooklyn (U.S., 1949-2003; 15m)
DURING ITS GOLDEN AGE BEFORE THE EMERGENCE OF ARTISTS' UTOPIA
Footage of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, filmed in 1949-51. Poor man's/immigrants' Utopia. - Jonas Mekas
Total running time: 61m;
Sat Oct 18: 7:00
PROGRAM 4
above: orifso
ORIFSO (Lis Rhodes, U.K., 1999; 13m)
A fable of Europe, 1943-98, located in the picture space, on a road in
France, and on the streets of London - Lis Rhodes
above: trauma victim
Trauma Victim (Robert Todd, U.S., 2003; 17m)
For over a year I've been working on the subject of the Death Penalty and its significance to our culture. This piece has grown out of the footage that I've shot for that film, and some of the concepts I've been juggling as the imagery has been cultivated. In fact I initially put this film together with the intention of using the visual components in sequence to later serve as the fifth section of the larger work.
Travelling by car from prison to prison allowed me to see America as many of us have come to experience it: as tourists who can lay no legitimate claim to the space we pretend to inhabit. The inertia inherent to mechanical transport served to reinforce a not uncommon sense of the experience of travel as an entirely mediated activity, a contemporary paradigm for humanity.
Denied the exigencies of the Natural within these our protected spheres, our frames of reference become increasingly obtuse as we rely on ourselves to provide the terms by which the world can be known. As a result of our dependence on this solipsistic form of understanding, it seems to me that we are born into a state of suspension wherein we are unable to fully develop. It is a life that could not hope to offer a sense of completion or solid connection to any environment outside of itself.
In painting this self-portrait, I found that the state I was trying to express was that arising from trauma. - Robert Todd
above: apollo
Apollo (Tomonari Nishikawa, Japan/U.S., 2003; 6m)
Visuals are formed with photogram plus images shot by 35mm SLR, super 8, and 16mm cameraS, including positive, negative, and reticulated ones. Sound comes from these images or scratches spread on the optical
soundtrack. It begins softly, and ends with "frenzy."
-
Tom Nishikawa
above: duct and cover
Duct and Cover (Devon Damonte, U.S., 2003; 4.5m)
Using ordinary materials - clear duct tape stuck directly onto 16mm clear leader
- Duct and Cover creates an elevated zone of experience guided by a grid of threads riding a 16mm river of mucillagenous translucent goo. The focus is on the material velocity of stuff flowing through the projector apparatus, rather than on illusions of movement or images in sequence. It's funny and scary and dirty and angry and sticky all at once. Kinda like when we used to climb under the desk for school "air raid drills" when the city siren sounded at 11 a.m. the fourth Friday of every month. Duct and Cover also includes tape lifts of U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security's "Preparing Makes Sense" brochure from www.ready.gov, which reminds us "We can be afraid, or we can be ready." Are those our only choices? - Devon Damonte
above: secrets of mexuality
Secrets of Mexuality (Martha Colburn, Netherlands, 2003; 6m)
Secrets of Mexuality explores the male and female stereotypes of wrestling, old Mexican paintings and kitsch Mexican imagery. The film is first created using flat puppet animation on super 8 mm and then hand scratching/coloring each individual frame to reveal deeper aspects of the imagery. A dance of sexual forces, gyrating and vibrating with transformations and spastic actions occurring. Cactus oral sex, laser shooting nipples, and painting striptease are but a few of the scenes from this film rich with the questions of the Mexican body and soul.Originally, Secrets of Mexuality was a film made specifically for a special live orchestral accompaniment screening in Mexico. The composer is Felipe Waller. - Martha Colburn
Person'na (Jennifer Debauche, Belgium, 2002; 16m)
Thrubbing jello, thrubbing flesh: buffet of hurling bodies. Enter through the window in the pantheon of hysterical virgins waiting for redemption in their prettiest skin. -Jennifer Debauche
PS When You Are Going To Die (Stom Sogo, U.S./Japan, 2003; 12m)
The films of Stom Sogo are incantatory and self combustible. If the term
Exploding Plastic Inevitable ever goes up for grabs it belongs to Stom.
Sogo accurately skews his diopter to a world off balance and sets his
controls for the heart of the sun. Then he jumps in head first. An
erratic master of low tech do-it-yourself sortilege (who sometimes lets
go of the wheel) he put his works through seemingly perpetual remakes.
Like an irrepressible scratch DJ or Warhol with his lithographs, Sogo
subjects his colors to furry retunings as he retools his soundtracks to
new alternate mixes.
Sogo's films - lysergic spellbinding, and punch-drunk, wrest illicit
candor and alienated intimacies - spiking the jugular of his images,
making the blood rush to their heads. Moments of profound distraction
swerve into pinpoint acuity as randomly as senility and as tremulous as
enlightenment.
These abrupt changes in cabin pressure and elevation, the prolonged
crests of tidal waves of image and sound are steadied if not calmed by
Sogo's formal awareness spontaneously deciding on spur of the moment
special edition intentions. But all of the versions of his work are shot
through with shocks of scattershot mischief and human poetry.
Static shreds the air, bleeds the ear, and changes the electron flow
while summoning our endorphins. Given over to his disconsolate and
celebratory lull and hammer we cry out in unison with that baffling
defiant phrase of nihilistic jubilance "Eijanaika!" Roughly translated
as "Whatever" " So What" "What the Fuck!!"
While Stom can deliver a psychedelic knuckle sandwich akin to a Jud
Yalkut (pace Yalkut's "Dementia Praecox" videos), he has parallels with
contemporaries like (the perhaps more disciplined) Glen Fogel in terms
of setting up active color rivalries and elegant misregistrations of
image layerings. But all of Sogo's work has an unmistakable personality
and thrust.
In his newest digital piece Sogo cannibalizes some of his previous
footage but includes new documentary-diaristic footage, sandblasting it
with wobbly lyricism and choked distress - staying cool as the world
unravels on schedule. Bracing, cryptic and unsettling this piece shows
an advance in both decisiveness and risk. The soundscape is terrifyingly
beautiful. The images take us on strange country roads, into the thick
of drug deals and suspicious fires ravished and abandoned love and
unidentifiable turbulence. Whiplash edits prevail over vérité moments
that eventually become unmoored by dreamlike intrusions. Some cuts have
the power of pulmonary arrest and others are non -abrasive but startling
in their disjunctions of time and place.
Like its title PS. When You Are Going to Die it feels like an urgent
postscript and a richly ambiguous sentence left dangling and torn in a
crosswind. - Mark McElhatten
Total running time: 74m
Sat Oct 18: 9.00
PROGRAM 5
Loretta (Jeanne Liotta, U.S., 2003; 4m; sound by Carlo Altomare)
I love that which dazzles me and then accentuates
the darkness within me. - Rene Char.
A handmade photogram opera of laborious incarnations and corporeal dissolutions, this film started out as a series of abstract miniatures, then rendered into life by a million flashlit moments. And so Loretta insists upon herself;
the evidence is an absolute aria, dissolving into the infinite. Living in time as high drama. Yellow conceived of as light materialized; a pure value emitting a particular frequency of energy, applied by hand. A dialectical manifestiation of phenomena in flux, like any other movie. - Jeanne Liotta
Chinese Series (Stan Brakhage, Canada, 2003; 2m)
Scratching on spit-softened emulsion with bare fingernails, Stan completed this work - all that he could manage of his long dreamed-of Chinese Series - in his bed, a couple of months before his death. Printed by Courtney Hoskins, who has written that: "On the negative, it seemed to have the essence of Chinese characters - strokes and blocks, etc. In motion, it seems almost like running through a humid bamboo forest . . . green and yellow stalks create these glowing shadows as they cut across the sunlight."
- Canyon Cinema
above: if only
If Only (Fred Worden, U.S., 2003; 7½m)
The bubble shaped orb of the human head, perched atop its touchy-feely transport system has seven moist oval openings through which everything outside comes in: two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth and two ears. Inside the bubble head, bubble universes spawn ad infintum and the only passable direction is directly into the steady headwinds of an ever advancing infinity of veils. A high wire bobbing and weaving just to stay upright. These artful if endless veil penetrations are at once the human job description as well as nature's shot at vindicating the transient in the face of the impassive infinite. Nature makes the orifices moist so things can stick, at least momentarily.
The intoxicated camera operator shoots the moon slipping through the barren trees. The rabbit hole's light shadow appears and he obliges, head first, no looking back. His cranium (like yours) is packed with illusions, but down the rabbit hole they treasure the same just so long as they're custom fabricated, hand tooled and conscious. Down this hole, stalking the unforeseen non-translatable is all. Join in here. - Fred Worden
above: polymer
Polymer (Courtney Hoskins & Carl Fuermann, U.S., 2003; 25 secs)
Polymer is a chain of full pieces
a string of twisted light particles
more durable together than as separate parts
many made into one
transformation by heat of light
alchemical chain reaction
refraction of light as time
time reflected across the universe. - Courtney Hoskins & Carl Fuermann
above: i began to wish
I Began To Wish…………. (Julie Murray, U.S., 2003; 5m)
The sea sucks the seed back into the ocean, the flowers fold like umbrellas, shoots recoil into hiding, in seeds that shrink. The plants accelerate their tremble and wobble and glass unbreaks all around them. Strawberries blanch and tomatoes grow pale. The father, leering, holds forth a flower and suddenly his smile fades to awful seriousness. In an odd concentrated ritual the father and son carefully tip over all the flower pots, laying the plants to rest and it is in this end, around the time he figures the flowers are talking to him, that the son wishes his father had killed him.
- Julie Murray
The Galilean Satellites (Courtney Hoskins, U.S., 2003; 26m)
The Galilean Satellites is a series of four films that explore the four large moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo Galilei on January 7, 1610 : Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The discovery of these satellites disproved the then-popular geocentric model of the heavens, turning the world of Astronomy upside down, and laid the groundwork for our current understanding of the solar system.
The Galilean Satellites are complex dynamic bodies that are highly influenced by their surroundings. Their close proximity to Jupiter encourages their individual personalities. The Giant planet's gravitational forces produce tidal effects on the moons, warming them and provoking tectonic activity. Magnetic radiation from the gas giant interacts with their atmospheres, creating auroras and storms.
This series of four films is a personal response to and reflection on working in the close orbit of Stan Brakhage, whose mass of work and gravity of being rivaled that of Jove himself. His works turned the world of cinema inside out and honestly portrayed the complexity of the spectrum of human emotions. The series is also a reflection on my relationships with those fellow Coloradoan "satellites" with whom I feel a close bond through our shared cinematic and human experiences.
These films were made through a similar manipulation of dynamic materials. Materials in a delicate phase of matter - liquid crystal - were pushed to their individual limits by bending, pressing and heating. The changes provoked by these forces - strange and subtle changes in visible light - were recorded on film. The result is an exploration of plastic materials in a plastic medium. The optical soundtrack consists of a recording made in the invisible part of the electromagnetic spectrum: radio recordings of Io, Ganymede and Jupiter from NASA's Galileo and Voyager missions, also manipulated to express the personalities of these moons. - Courtney Hoskins
Read the complete notes for The Galilean Satellites here.
Fl. Oz. (Julie Murray, U.S., 2003; 6m)
The most striking thing about observing the falls is that they don’t seem to be "falling" at all but, being so vast, give the impression of doing just the opposite. As one looks, this idea comes in and the body feels elevated and rotated with its force.
Like as "look" is to "leap", the naming of this picture of Niagara’s waterous site, by way of a metaphoric matrix of bubbly spit volleyed from the tip of the tongue to contribute to all the world’s great oceans in a barrel-suited outfit of onomatopoeic wit, is an attempt to allude to all that is other than looking that has to do with apprehension. - Julie Murray.
above: elements
Elements (Jim Jennings, U.S., 2003; 6m)
Elements refers not only to the natural elements, which are variable and
even capricious, but also to the social elements, working-class people
who are trying to maintain order and routine. - Jim Jennings
Eyedrops of pearl-grey rain bead along the surfaces of Gotham City.
Peripatetic man "on the beat" Jennings plays raincatcher, capturing the
moments of parenthetical reflection brought on by weather and its
softening force of delay. He finds, in the small details of off-handed
moments under close observation, elective affinities - a casual pageant
of relative inactivity, and the specialties of ordinary goings-on muted
by precipitation.
Elements is an ode to fortuitous inclemency. With his eye for formal
abstraction in near perfect balance with drifting documentation Jennings
perseveres, in a city nearly photographed to death, in bringing to light
familiar elements saved from disregard and savored into sharp filmic
articulation. - Mark McElhatten
Stan's Window & work in progress (Stan Brakhage, Canada, 2003; 13m)
Stan's Window is the last film completed by Stan Brakhage. This is a live action film with poetic images from inside of Stan's house in Victoria, Canada. Titled to echo Marilyn's Window ("one of the first films I made after meeting Marilyn"), this photographed film is a self-portrait-at-home. - Canyon Cinema
Total running time: 70m;
Sun Oct 19: 1:00
above: star spangled to death
PROGRAM 6: KEN JACOBS
Big Commotion Pictures presents Star Spangled To Death
Filmed 1957-59, first edit 1960; video 2003; 6 hrs. 20 min.
Jack Smith………...The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living
Jerry Sims…………Suffering
Gib Taylor
& Bill Carpenter…..The Two Evils
Cecilia Swan………Misplaced Charity
Ken Jacobs………...Oscar Friendly, Ringmaster and Janitor.
with Laurie Taylor, Bob Fleischner, Reese Haire, and a cameo by Jim Enterline as The Future.
Place: No-Future-Land, N.Y. A Playtime Production by Ken Jacobs
Star Spangled to Death is an epic film costing hundreds of dollars! An antic collage combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming (I once said directing Jack and Jerry was like directing the wind). It is a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Race and religion and monopolization of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war become props for clowning. In whimsy we trusted. A handful of artists costumed and performing unconvincingly appeal to audience imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith's pre-Flaming Creatures performance is a cine-visitation of the divine (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions). His character, The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living, celebrates Suffering, personified by poor, rattled, fierce Jerry Sims, as an inextricable essence of living.
above: star spangled to death
I was 24 when I began the film, Jack 25. Jerry in his mid-thirties seemed middle-aged to us. Jack later said, I think appreciatively, I taught him to hate America. We met in 1954 and got to hanging around, broke most of the time, walking the streets "shadow starved" (Jack's expression) for movies a mind could fix on. Max Ophuls's Sins Of Lola Montez, even in its producer-reassembled state, stood out in its love of the art, in showing what a camera could still do. Hollywood with some few exceptions had gone numb, frantic and numb in this time of fascist ascendance and cultural impoverishment. The enemy had been switched from Right to Left at the end of World War II and the owners had returned with a vengeance. Their message was simple: "Shut up and do what you're told." War had done the trick of loosening industry from its Depression fix and war would now be America's raison d'être. War would serve to rid the country of excess wealth, lest more equitable distribution shake its class structure. In light of how much bullshit it takes to win a war, consider the bullshit it takes to sell ongoing war-to-war-to-war; we were inundated. Only the Abstract-Expressionist painters had been left to proclaim the old radical hopes (because the liberties they took were abstract). The Sixties were nowhere in sight.
Then one day on the set (the rear courtyard of the W. 75 St. brownstone where I was janitor) Jack pushed a copy of On The Road into my hands, saying, "It's about us." I'd been reading Paul Bowles and H.P. Lovecraft and a smuggled-in copy of Lolita and the drop in writing level was too steep. "You'll be able to stay with it on your sixth attempt," Jack said, which proved to be true. It caught some things right, quirky ephemerals that hadn't registered as events. Of course it helped stir a social revolution (disowned by Kerouac) and maybe Star Spangled To Death would've participated in that great humanist eruption if I had completed it and got it out in its proper time. Over six hours then, there was no way I could pay final sound-joining and printing lab costs. I screened camera originals a few times to records and spoken commentary but money didn't happen and, pissed, in 1963 I put it aside to continue with affordable works (like near cost-free shadowplay). Its moment, I felt, had passed. Its invention, the very look of it, its texture was to a degree no longer unique. My pride was wounded. People were treating me as if I was normal. I got a measure of Jack's fame when I heard a girl address her dog as Flaming Creature, but he chose - at a time when patrons were available to him - not to help. Like maybe his movie might be seen as coming from somewhere. I let it go and had another life, better I'm sure than the one that would've resulted from the release then of Star Spangled To Death. I recall thinking when Kennedy took office there was less urgency to get it out. He looked like he had a sex life, had little kids that he surely wanted to raise above-ground, and indeed he did interfere with the Eisenhower plan to return Cuba to the Mob, costing him his life.
above: star spangled to death
Video makes its present release possible. Yeah, yeah, it ain't film, and I'd already begun my quest with it into the actuality of film rather than film as transparency. Rising from my own abstract-expressionist mindset. Let me be. I so appreciate what video permits (although the work, with one sinful exception, the reprise of "Are You Havin' Any Fun?", does not take off into electron freeplay but stays respectful of film limits), and I appreciate the possibility of cheap DVD distribution. And if anyone has the passion and money and patience the video can guide final assembly of the film. At age 70 I have to attend to other cine-demands, like leaving something lasting of what Flo and I did
in live performance with the Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern.
"Something lasting"? Habit of thought. I wonder if our masters (the hallowed image of the White House insists, to the subconscious, that The Old Plantation prevails) figure, in rationalizing a way to live with their crimes, that "natural death" is often no less painful than an accelerated conclusion, so what the hell, the little fuckers will replenish their numbers soon enough. From where they are we all look alike, excepting those of us that stand up. I don't feel hopeful when Bush lies are exposed, implausible to begin with; followers elect to believe, and hold on to beliefs doggedly. Followers expect leaders to lie and believing an obvious lie is how they demonstrate their faith. Lying mostly offends professors and not all of them by a long shot. No, I think we're due to be interrupted, that history is about to come down through the roof on us this time. Sorry, truly, but I believe my film-title. Perhaps that it arose to mind almost a half-century ago and so many of us are still here, in sight of scientific breakthroughs galore, is reason for confidence in ongoing life. We certainly can resist the bastards! They are taking our lives, what more can we lose? Jack fumbled the making of his last film but how meaningful a title is No
President.
Here, explaining, you get gravity. The movie achieves levity.
Is this video the real thing? In the winter of 1959 editing facilities were two nails in a wall holding two film reels and an enlarging glass and in 2003 a G4 with Final Cut Pro. Better to figure the entirety as another entry in my found-film oeuvre. I did drop some found-films from the original collage, including all biographic elements (like my maybe-father's third-wedding home movies), replacing with items more on track
with central concerns of the work. Stuff gathered over the years with SSTD in mind, only some that could be squeezed into its ultimate realization. The Follies entered sometime in the Sixties, the Micheaux's Ten Minutes To Live entered my life with a bang in 1968 (being up there with the greatest; the DVD of SSTD should by rights be a double-feature with Ten Minutes To Live seeing as the titles go so well together) but only infiltrated SSTD during this latest editing. Ronald Reagan and the twerp presiding now, how ignore them? Perhaps with precisely the same pitch of outrage as my younger self I would not have made any concessions to audience capacity, only added things.
There's friends, I know, that will be glum over what they will perceive as signs of an orderly mind. My head, inside, isn't all that different from what it was, I didn't become someone else, but I did get the work together and, in a profound way, that's the problem. It was supposed to lie in a jumbled heap, errant energies going nowhere, the talented viewer inferring form. A Frankenstein that fizzled but twitching and still
dangerous to approach. Thoroughly star spangled but still kicking. - Ken Jacobs
Part I (240m) 3:30pm
Intermission 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Part II (135m) 8:30pm
Please note special admission rates for Program 6 (Parts I & II): $15 general public, $12 Film Society members
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