Last fall I took a walk by the New York
harbor with the brilliant underground film artist Ken Jacobs,
not far from the loft he has long shared with his wife, Flo. He
talked about his freshly completed reedit (on digital video) of
his sparkling yet searing social critique Star Spangled to Death, a
collage of mass-cultural detritus and guerrilla theater with
which he has wrestled for over four decades. It is, he said, an
expression of real anguish, in which hearty doses of humor and
antic energy highlight what is eclipsed by the forces of death.
On our way back, as we passed the colossal scar that marks the
site of the former World Trade Center, he gestured
disconsolately toward Stuyvesant High School and said,
“Can you believe what those kids had to see?” And
things, he insisted, were only getting worse. He said that
after the invasion of Iraq he’d considered adding an
intertitle to Star Spangled reading, “Now they’ve done
it.” When I asked him recently about the remark, he
couldn’t remember using those exact words but pointed out
that his fears over the aftermath of 9/11 are reflected in the
film in the line—an allusion to Von Stroheim’s Greed—“We’re
dead men...and dead everything else.”
A passionate fixture in New
York’s noncommercial film community for years, Jacobs has
followed an uncompromising trajectory. Many of his radically
inventive works defy categorization: Blonde Cobra
(1958–63) reworked an abandoned film by his friend Bob
Fleischner of the late performer, filmmaker, and photographer
in El Paso some years back.) Filmed in
black-and-white and color 16mm. stock between 1957 and 1960, this
delirious stream of theatrical provocations “stars”
Smith and Sims, though it features other friends/collaborators.
Playing The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, Smith prances
around Sims’ character, Suffering, and celebrates him as
an unavoidable ingredient of life. Cast as the ultimate outsider—sensitive,
artistic, whiny, broke, unphotogenic—Sims mopes, mugs,
kvetches to Jacobs, and wrings his hands. Armed with
accessories like bowler hats, a pope’s miter, and broken
umbrellas, art stubbornly collides with life. The pair’s
clowning has a Happening-like messiness, sharpened by
Jacobs’ political convictions and obsession with the
notions of failure and incompletion. At one point Smith,
festooned with junk, cavorts on a sidewalk near a nervous-looking
woman waiting for a bus; when the bus arrives he tries and
fails to dance on to it. In his vivid program notes for a
screening of Star Spangled at the American Museum of the Moving
Image, Jacobs wrote, “Its proto-Beat sensibility refuses
to keep moving ahead, so at odds with the lemming drift of the
1950’s when chauvinist anti-Communism threatened us all
with a final star spangling to death.”
He doesn’t see
today’s situation as less dire, however. Funny, scathing,
and aggrieved, the sub- and intertitles that punctuate Star Spangled include
such choice lines as “Capitalism sold them a bill of
bads” and “Privilege will remain, cheered
intimations of chaos or breakdown, end
flares brazenly coexisting with dynamic compositions and manic
swirling or panning held-held movement. A former Action painter
who studied with Hans Hofmann, he brings to moviemaking an
exquisite talent for activating the film frame and exploiting
the illusion of depth. Cannily arranged layers of plastic,
fabric, or toilet paper—draped, floating, thrown on the
ground—are an impoverished version of the silvery veils
that fill the shallower spaces of Josef Von Sternberg’s
films, and function as fluid props. (They also resurfaced in
the crowded mise-en-scène of Smith’s movies.) Such
charming bits of refuse as a papier-mâché cat
head, found signage, and a shattered mirror limn a
rat’s-nest-like parallel world in which intellectuals and
other outcasts patch together a shaky existence. Redolent of
urban grit, the locations include the ravaged Lincoln Center
construction site, an uptown backyard, a downtown rooftop, and
Sims’ squalid, if creatively jam-packed pad. (The shoots
were a creative milestone for Smith as well: Jacobs not only
helped shape his aesthetic but also loaned him a camera, which
he used to make his first film on one of the same sites.)
Star
Spangled’s final chapter,
titled “The Height of Folly,” is at once the most
joyful and tragic. We are told it opens in Limbo, where
“outtakes drift...in no apparent order.” Jacobs
introduces recent color footage of an antiwar rally by
suggesting it shows Smith’s spirit brought back to life:
chanting “Drop Bush Not
Bombs!” an
Art Overview: Sarah
Gavlak presents an overview of artists, curators, and writers
being creative in a depressing economic and social climate
Art FEATURE:
Includes cover and photography series by Tom Wood, with an
essay by curator Jane Fletcher and Interview by Jan-Willem
Dikkers
Jack Smith; Tom,
Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969–71)
closely examined a 1905 nursery rhyme one-reeler through
rephotography (one of its mysterious frames graced the cover of
Artforum’s 1971 special film issue); The
Sky Socialist (1965–67)
evoked young love, political consciousness, and the Brooklyn
Bridge; and Perfect Film (1985) was a found reel of news outtakes on the
Malcolm X assassination. He is also admired for a string of
revelatory ephemeral works—shadow plays, and numerous
found-footage performances deploying a patented system of
altered stop-motion projectors that create flickering depth
effects. Jacobs himself may have been the first to use the term
“underground film.” As a professor at SUNY
Binghamton for thirty-two years, he left an indelible mark on
many in his classes. In a 1989 review, one of these students, Village Voice
senior critic J. Hoberman, dubbed him “one of the
most extraordinary unknown personalities in the history of
American movies.”
Inevitably, Ken and Flo
found themselves in the front lines of the cinematic
underground. Against considerable odds, in the mid-sixties they
launched New York’s Millennium Film Workshop, where they
provided classes and equipment free of charge. More
dramatically, along with the filmmaker and poet Jonas Mekas,
they were tried and convicted of obscenity charges after
screening Flaming Creatures—an archly voluptuous orgy fantasy
featuring an array of downtown angels—by a fellow
avant-garde meteorite Jack Smith, in an East Village theater in
1964. (The case, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court, became a
cause célèbre, with such luminaries as Susan
Sontag rushing to defend Creatures in print.)
The heart of Star Spangled is
footage Jacobs shot of Smith, whom he met in 1956, and
Ken’s personal find, the unemployed eccentric Jerry Sims.
(Smith died of AIDS in 1989; Sims’ trail vanished
elegant young man wearing beads and a
turbanlike hat sways to a hypnotic drumbeat alongside a knot of
kids sporting face paint, tinsel, wigs, and foil horns. Time
respools like the wind and we see Smith swinging from a fire
escape decked in a fez and plastic cape before a heartbreaking
intertitle alludes to his religious upbringing and feelings of
guilt over his sexual orientation. Gorgeous black-and-white
images flow by: Jack in masked shots that confine him to
rectangles in a field of black; glistening, rain-soaked
streets, the anxious din of cars honking, and Jerry standing
alone in a downpour. Then, as compensation for playing the
stereotype of the suffering Jew, Jerry is allowed to burn a
Nelson Rockefeller poster and a poignantly idyllic “cast
party” ensues. Color footage shot years later shows an
older Jerry, munching on a roll—and looking as painfully
vulnerable as people down on their luck can while they are
eating.
After this beautiful
paroxysm of mourning for Jacobs’ lost performers—and
the rest of humanity—Star
Spangled concludes with a
determined, only faintly Beckettian, call to optimism:
“There is plenty of reason to despair. We can’t
despair. Despair is collaboration with the enemy.” In a
recent e-mail Jacobs sent after presenting the film in Europe
with Flo, he wrote, “Being socially pertinent has been a
bust, and—that being the aim of SSTD—I’m ready
to rack up another failure. But we do enjoy seeing the work
however null its social effect. Beat then, the Fifties, beat
now.” Then he sent a correction: “Wait. The
first first aim was to make something alive. And that I
did.”
—
Star Spangled to Death was recently screened at the Museum of Modern Art and
Anthology Film Archives, among other venues. It is also
forthcoming on DVD from Big Commotion Pictures, LLC (NervousKern@aol.com).
music Overview: Essay
by Alan Licht comparing and contrasting the evolution of the
music scenes in Manchester and Cleveland
social commentary: Extensive excerpt of Dis Voir book School Spirit by
Douglas Coupland and Pierre Hughes
fashion: Series
by Toby Kaufmann, Styled by John Vertin
pass the buck: Exclusive
collaborative portfolio created for Issue by Pipilotti Rist and
Marijke Van Warmerdam
