bootlab e.v.
gerichtstr 65
13347 berlin/germany
bootlab at bootlab dot org
mission -->
events -->
projects -->
members -->
2008 -->
2007 -->
2006 -->
2005 -->
2004 -->
2003 -->
2002 -->
2001 -->
2000 -->
>>43characters >> -->
"north avenue club" -->
gemeinsam utube gucken (test event) -->
nerd-prostitution -->
speaking books -->
the oil of the 21st century -->
screenings -->
open source tools in design education -->
radio bar -->
radiobar -->
amerikanische botschaft -->
in absentia -->
pirate cinema -->
reboot.fm -->
bar im radio -->
attachment -->
copy cultures -->
bootlab raum 3 -->
kino raum 3 -->
real -->
last tuesday -->
This project has been funded with support
from the European Commision.
And here's what political cinema would look like: Jack Smith and Jerry Sims in
Manhattan in the 1950s, Richard Nixon on TV, racist cartoons, neocolonial
documentaries and evangelical talk radio, clips from Hollywood movies,
newsreels and television shows, video footage of the protests against the Iraq
War and a 100-page treatise on the past, present and future of capitalism in
America added as subliminal text. Nothing short of a complete animated history
of the United States in the 20th century, and certainly one of the greatest
found-footage films in the history of avantgarde cinema, Ken Jacobs' "Star
Spangled to Death" took 100 dollars to make and 40 years to finish. It takes
seven hours to watch, and even though, obviously, you're invited to walk in or
out at your own leisure, we recommend seeing this film from start to finish.
Scroll down for links to trailer, screenshots and transcript, plus a couple
of reviews, below the fold. RSVP, ASAP, FCFS. Season finale next sunday.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
pirate cinema berlin
u kottbusser tor
sunday, october 30, 6 pm
star spangled to death
ken jacobs
2004, 431 mins
trailer: www.piratecinema.org/trailers/sstd.mp4
screenshots: www.piratecinema.org/screenshots/sstd.pdf
transcript: www.piratecinema.org/transcripts/sstd.pdf
12 seats, rsvp
first come first serve
location in separate mail
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The ultimate underground movie, "Star Spangled to Death," Ken Jacobs's epic,
bargain-basement assemblage, annotates a lyrical junkyard allegory with chunks
of mainly '30s American movies -- or is it the other way around?
When Parker Tyler identified the cinematic desire to "provide a documentary
showcase for the underdog's spontaneous, uncontrolled fantasy," he was surely
thinking of Jacobs's desperately beautiful immersion in childish behavior and
political despair. Jacobs began shooting "Star Spangled" in the late '50s, and
the movie has become his life's work. Over the years, he's screened it in
various versions -- for the 1976 Bicentennial as "Flop," heavily Reaganized in
1984, and a few years later for his AMMI retro. The movie has always been "too
long," but this six-hour, possibly definitive, version, showing at the New York
Film Festival, adds even more found footage -- including a 30-minute prologue
drawn from a documentary of Osa and Martin Johnson in Africa -- while updating
sections with references to the war in Iraq.
Jacobs alternates between marshaling evidence and showcasing manic performance.
The young Jack Smith appears variously as a sheikh, a matador, a bishop, and an
odalisque. Smith is fearless in making a public spectacle of himself.
Repeatedly mixing it up with his environment -- erupting on the Bowery in
gauze-festooned splendor or materializing on St. Marks Place with a paper-bag
crown and brandishing a mop -- he provides a constant Feuillade effect,
introducing wild fantasy into the sooty neorealism of '50s New York. Jacobs
provides him with a foil -- an emaciated piece of human wreckage, Jerry Sims,
typically seen amid the creepy clutter of his Lower East Side hovel. (In the
last chapter, Sims's misery is redeemed -- he's permitted to set fire to a
campaign poster for the movie's bête noire Nelson Rockefeller.)
Jacobs uses movies throughout -- a Warners short made to publicize the NRA; an
early, scummy Mickey Mouse cartoon; an excerpt from "Kid Millions" in which
Eddie Cantor opens a "free" ice-cream factory -- to ground the action in
Depression flashbacks. This found material, often layered with added sound,
allows Jacobs to brood on human programming, military triumphalism, and -- most
insistently -- American racism. There's a devastating progression from a
virtual Nazi-toon version of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" through Al Jolson's infamous
"Going to Heaven on a Mule" and an excerpt from Oscar Micheaux's "God's Step
Children" to Khalid Muhammad's speech in praise of LIRR gunman Colin Ferguson.
The Holocaust figures here as well -- although Jacobs ultimately apologizes for
typecasting the outcast Sims as suffering ghetto Jew.
Although the movie's collage structure is designed to boggle the mind,
individual shots can be breathtaking. Jacobs's dynamic compositions use
mirrors, scrims, and random debris in a manner anticipating Smith's "Flaming
Creatures." (Indeed, shown as performance, "Star Spangled to Death" provided
the model for Smith's own unfinished epics -- particularly "No President.") In
the end, the movie turns mournfully self-reflexive. With its intimations of
aesthetic utopia amid the rubble of social collapse, this is a tragic
meditation on what Jean-Luc Godard called "the film of history."
-- Jim Hoberman
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
With a running time of 6 hours and 42 minutes, "Star Spangled to Death" is the
magnum opus of the independent filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Begun in 1957 as a
backyard bohemian romp starring the avant-garde legend Jack Smith -- an amazing
proto-drag performer who later directed his own underground classic, "Flaming
Creatures" -- the project grew over the years to incorporate huge chunks of
appropriated material, including, for example, the entirety of Richard M.
Nixon's 1952 Checkers speech and what seems like most of an early 30's
documentary on what was then known as "darkest Africa." For this provisionally
definitive version, which opens today for a one-week engagement at the
Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, Mr. Jacobs has brought his film
up-to-date with topical references to the war in Iraq and the Bush
administration.
The core of the film remains the 1950's material, a self-consciously cheesy
morality play in which the lanky, lunar Smith (who died in 1989) dons costumes
assembled from throw rugs, strips of tulle, plastic sheets, fishnets and pretty
much anything else at hand to embody the Spirit Not of Life but of Living, a
freewheeling sprite who whirls through the button-down Manhattan of the
Eisenhower years. His opposite number is Suffering, a figure played by Jerry
Sims, a down-and-out, painfully emaciated artist whose whining about the
unfairness of life fills much of the post-synchronized soundtrack. With Smith
and Sims representing the poles of human experience, Mr. Jacobs uses his
recycled films to explore the ideologies that swirl around them, affecting
their marginal American lives.
Rather than use brief clips from campy old films to score easy political points
-- in the manner of, say, the unfortunately influential "Atomic Cafe" from 1982
-- Mr. Jacobs brilliantly and generously allows much of the borrowed material
to play out in its entirety, at which point it indicts itself without need of
sarcastic voice-over commentary. One of the most horrifying passages in "Star
Spangled" is an undated CBS documentary, with a genial Charles Collingwood as
host, in which scientists subject rhesus monkeys to blatantly sadistic
experiments intended to give a strict scientific definition to the notoriously
elusive concept of love. Mr. Jacobs rightly realizes that any further
editorializing on this grim film would be superfluous.
The twin bugbears of "Star Spangled to Death" are racism and religion, the
former represented by Hollywood cartoons of the early 30's (featuring a brief
appearance by Mickey Mouse, described as a direct descendant of the minstrel
show tradition) and the latter by a long audio excerpt from a faith-healing
program, in the course of which God is called upon to cure a foot fungus.
Sometimes Mr. Jacobs's preoccupations come together, as when he quotes the
"Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" production number from "Wonder Bar" (1934),
featuring Al Jolson in blackface ascending to a celestial paradise where angels
shoot craps and pork chops grow on trees.
New material, shot on video in pointed contrast to the 16-millimeter film that
makes up most of the production, insists on the continued relevance of Mr.
Jacobs's concerns. At a 2003 antiwar rally in Midtown, Mr. Jacobs comes across
a figure he describes as "the spirit of Jack," a protest leader who does seem
to share Smith's radical insouciance. Whether or not this is the final version
of "Star Spangled to Death" (Mr. Jacobs is a youthful 70, with plenty of time
for further modifications), it stands as a rare living, breathing example of
American avant-garde filmmaking, a species unfortunately well on its way to
extinction.
-- Dave Kehr
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Organic, living organism that grew and grew over the period of 47 years.
Ken says, "The film is done; it weighed on me all those years." But I wouldn't
take that for the last word. Maybe the only film I know that is "Artaud:
Monumental Song of Despair & Hope." Of epic proportions, incredibly complex in
meanings. It's an absolute masterpiece that will be seen differently by every
viewer. The greatest found-footage film. No found-footage film can be made
after this one; add to it Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Julius Ziz, and Bill
Morrison. A film that contains some of the most cinematic and grotesque film
material from the first 100 years of commercial cinema.
A film that is not about avant-garde. A film that is not like Brakhage or the
last Bruce Elder, who create their own worlds of their own making. This one
creates a world according to Ken Jacobs out of bits of the banal, clichéd,
grotesque, vulgar, dripping sentimentality that is being sold to the people as
real food and everybody feeds on it and even enjoys it and then dies.
Ken Jacobs: "It is a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously
sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict."
So Ken takes a knife and cuts it all open. Irreverently and lovingly and with a
skill of a good surgeon he reveals it all to us from the inside, and we do not
know whether to laugh, cry, run out screaming, or applaud.
And there is Jerry and Jack wrapped in it all, trying to live in it, to exist
one way or another -- you have to be Jack to still dance through it all at the
same time as you cry and starve. Yes, this is a film that sums it all up and
you almost hate it, but at the same time you know it's all true, it's all true,
this is all the America we live in, our home, the official America of the 20th
century, here it is on the plate, so eat it and then vomit it all out.
Luckily for me, this is not my America in this film: I live in another America,
the America of my dreams.
-- Jonas Mekas
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
()
><
pirate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
<-- back