Carte blanche
Philippe-Alain Michaud – Centre Pompidou
From the director of the Paris museum’s Experimental Cinema department, a selection of rare films by the American master
Ken Jacobs
SCENE, SPAZIO DELLA REGIONE LAZIO
Star Spangled to Death
May 28 6:00 pm. p.1
Author in connection
May 29 3:00 pm. p.2
Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son
May 30 8:00 pm.
Star Spangled to Death and Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son bring me in mind of my youth. Fun with Jack Smith, distress regarding the movement towards fascism of this country (President Ronald Reagan the clear turning point). Tried my best though things are worse today. Encouraged by the action in the streets of course, sorry too old and brittle to join in (at age 92). Grateful for our two kids (in their upper years), Nisi and Azazel and his beautiful wife Diaz, and for the visits of the downstairs cat. See the series of Cosmos-studies from the UK, especially ATOM.
Ken Jacobs
Star Spangled to Death
Usa / 440’ / 1956-60 / 2003-04
Is an epic film shot for hundreds of dollars! Combining found-films with my own more-or-less staged filming, it pictures a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Racial and religious insanity, monopolization of weath and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war oppose a beat playfulness. 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 as The Spirit Not Of Life But Of Living (the movie has raggedly comsmic pretensions), celebrating Suffering (rattled and impoverished artist Jerry Sims) at teh crux of sentient existence, is truly a visitation of the divine.
Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son
Usa / 115’ / 1969-71
Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son is an extended version (115 minutes) of a 9′ film of the same title made by G. W. (Billy) Bitzer in 1905 in Hollywood for the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. Bitzer’s film, based on a nursery rhyme, tells the story of Tom Tom, the piper’s son, who steals a pig and runs away. He is caught, beaten and left screaming in the street (the film ends with Tom Tom’s capture). The first sequence of Bitzer’s film is a tableau vivant inspired by a Hogarth engraving, The Southwark Fair (1733), where disparate figurative topos intersect and intermingle in a space that is part circus, part theater, and part playroom. The next seven sequences, devoted to the crowd’s race in pursuit of Tom, feature a succession of falling, climbing, rolling, and trampling movements: an allegory of sliding that responds to the first picture, which served as an allegory of snapping. Ken Jacobs’ film, an analytical found footage, is a meticulous exploration, pushed to saturation, of Bitzer’s source film. Jacobs uses freeze frame, flicker, close-ups of imperceptible details and slow motion to reduce the shot to a pure event of inscription, beyond its narrative dimension. Reduced to contrast effects, to oscillations of light and dark halos, the figures become spectres: we see them vibrate, flicker and finally resolve into their ultimate components: silver particles suspended in the gelatin layer that blacken in the light.
Philippe-Alain Michaud
Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs was born May 25th, 1933 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His family background was that of a broken home, with a father who didn’t care about him, and a mother who passed away when he was seven. His childhood life could be characterized, as he would call it, ” Disastrous but typical, bequeathing me a social disgust and anger that I have cultivated, refined, monumentalized, and I am gagging on.” His grim childhood had taught him to be a stronger person on the outside.
Aside from his early childhood difficulties, at the age of sixteen he had the opportunity to go to the Museum of Modern Art. There, he took a keen interest in various filmmakers, which then inspired him to write some of his own movie scripts. Also, he developed a love for art and painting. He attended the high school of Industrial Arts and often visited the film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
He served at the US Coast Guard. In 1955 he continued to study painting in New York, and in 1956 he studied with Hans Hoffmann.
Also in 1956 he befriended the filmmaker Jack Smith and began to work on his first films and first attempts in Silhouette Theater. In 1956, Jacobs put together a film called Orchard Street. Over the next couple of years, with the help of fellow filmmaker and classmate Jack Smith, his work was finally acknowledged. Smith, being a hopeful actor, starred in Jacob’s film Blonde Cobra as well as a few other films.
He founded the Millennium Film Workshop in New York. He then taught film studies at St. Johns University. In 1969 he founded the film department at the State University of New York in Binghamton together with Larry Gottheim. From 1971 to the present he has been professor of film in Binghamton. In 1986 he was a guest of the DAAD (Berlin Artist’s Program). In 1996 his work was shown in a comprehensive film retrospective in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Philippe-Alain Michaud
Curator at Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou, Area Menager of film archive. Techer of Story and theory of cinema at Université de Genève. Aurthor of Aby Warburg et l’image en mouvement (Macula, 1998), Le peuple des images (Desclée de Brouwer, 2004), Sur le Film (Macula, 2016), Anime primitive. Figure di celluloide, di peluche e di carta (Quodlibet, 2023). He wrote various articles on the relationship between cinema and visual arts. He has been curator of several exhibitions, including Comme le rêve le dessin (Musée du Louvre/Centre Pompidou, 2004), Le mouvement des images (Centre Pompidou, 2006), Nuits électriques (Musée, de la photographie, Moscou et Laboral (Gijon, Spain) 2007, Tapis volants (Villa Medici, Rome et Les Abattoirs, Toulouse) 2010, Beat Generation (Centre Pompidou, 2016), L’œil extatique : Sergueï Eisenstein à la croisée des arts (Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2019), Le reste est ombre(Centre Pompidou, 2022).