[Nettime-nl] ARGOS // KEN JACOBS screening, interview & unique performance (with Aki Onda)

["Stoffel Debuysere @ argos" <stoffel@argosarts.org>]

ARGOS, Centre for Art & Media and BOZAR Cinema (Brussels) present:

KEN JACOBS (US, 1933) is a key figure in the post-war experimental  
film world. After his university studies he found himself in the  
vivid artistic climate of New York of the 50s and 60s, where he made  
a name for himself as a committed filmmaker and activist. Together  
with his wife Flo he founded the Millennium Film Workshop, and was  
responsible for one of the first university cinema training courses.  
Jacobs' films and performances explore the subconscious of the  
cinematic experience, the regions where the construction of light,  
movement, speed and frame incite a purely sensorial shadowplay,  
beyond the borders of cinematographic time and space. In films such  
as Tom, Tom the Piper's Son (1969-1971) he dissects and manipulates  
existing film material, deconstructs each sequence and gesture,  
applies himself to texture and space, and choreographs, like a self- 
appointed “cine-puppeteer”, a secondary discourse of forgotten and  
explored time. In his performances and recent video work he explores  
the phenomenon of “eternalisms”, paradoxical appearances in which  
objects and figures seem to be captured in a spasm of infinite,  
slowly moving rotations. This is cinema which reverses the curve of  
human perception, and which takes its force from the mysteries of our  
own looking and thinking.

Sa 20.10.2007 // 14:00 – 23:00 // ARGOS // FREE
Star Spangled To Death
1957-2003, col./b&w, English spoken, 393’

14:00 Mark Webber in conversation with Ken Jacobs
15:00 part 1+2 (with short break in between)
18:00 dinner
20:00 part 3+4 (with short break in between)

This Magnum Opus by Ken Jacobs was in the making for almost half a  
century. Initiated in 1957 as one of his “urban-guerilla-cinema”  
projects with avant-garde legend Jack Smith, this film developed into  
a 6-hour-plus social criticism of the U.S. which, in his words, was  
“stolen and dangerously sold-out”. Footage of his own is combined  
with fragments from documentaries, cartoons, musicals and educational  
films, as a reflection on such issues as race and religion, war  
addiction and the monopolisation of wealth. A splendid immersion in  
clownish euphoria and political despair.

Mark Webber is an independent curator of avant-garde / experimental /  
artists' film and video. He has presented events and screenings as  
the Barbican Centre (Underground America, Cinema Auricular:  
Electronic Music and Film), ICA (Little Stabs at Happiness), Tate  
Modern (Like Seeing New York For The First Time, The Films of Andy  
Warhol), London Film Festival (Ken Jacobs' Nervous System, Peter  
Kubelka: What Is Film), Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage (Came the Loop Before  
The Sampler, Floating Through Time: The Films of Larry Jordan) and  
the Whitney Museum of American Art (The American Century Part 2:  
1950s & 1960s). He has been touring the world with Shoot Shoot Shoot,  
a major retrospective of the London Film-Makers' Co-operative &  
British Avant-Garde Film from 1966-76.

www.argosarts.org

Su 21.10.2007 // 20:30 // BOZAR // 9/7 euros
Ken Jacobs & Aki Onda
Nervous Magic Lantern Performance

The Nervous Magic Lantern unravels an unexpected film before our  
eyes, without actors, without a plot, without celluloid or video.  
Making use of pre-cinematographic techniques an illusory dreamworld  
is created, where the spectator is immersed in alienating, rotating  
landscapes suggesting the shape of volcanic glass, desolate craters  
or glacial gorges. The result is a hallucinatory three-dimensional  
watching experience, in which impossible phenomena and non-existing  
locations come to life in the projected dimension between the screen  
and the gaze of the spectator, like an innuendo of abstract shapes.

Musician, composer and visual artist Aki Onda (JP, 1967) is always on  
the lookout, camera and sound recorder at hand, ready to document his  
travels and encounters. He looks for meaning in the accumulation of  
those memories, when the specific experiences fade out and the  
architecture and essence of the memory reveals itself. His ongoing  
project Cassette Memories consists of a series of performances, or  
rituals, where he lets memories, recorded on soundtape, wander and  
collide with the sounds of the site-specific memory. Onda has  
previously worked with such artists as Alan Licht, Loren Connors,  
Michael Snow and Otomo Yoshihide. This is his first collaboration  
with Ken Jacobs.

RESERVATIONS:
PALEIS VOOR SCHONE KUNSTEN / PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS
www.bozar.be


part of the ARGOS programme OPEN ARCHIVE #1


Stoffel Debuysere
www.argosarts.org




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