Each new year Flo and I join the young and many-languaged crowd walking to the top of Brooklyn Bridge ostensibly for the fireworks. Fact is the crowd, the bridge, comprise the spectacle. The Bridge is particularly dear to us since the 'Sixties, when we learned the story of the Roeblings, father and...
Suggestion: Please see 'Another Occupation' before 'Seeking the Monkey King'. Contains flicker like many of my works; avoid if you have epilepsy or other unusual brain conditions.
"One of the nice things about movies was you could keep them at a distance. Movies knew their place. We were dimensional, they were flat, so it was easy to know which was which. But THE SCENIC ROUTE seemingly spills from the screen, threatening demarcation lines everywhere." --EAI
In this short and beautiful piece, Jacobs creates a flicker effect by editing close-up footage of a stream together with sections of black, producing a sense of constant movement that never progresses. The frame of the image shifts from vertical to horizontal and then slowly rotates 360 degrees,...
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film...
A 3-D vacation album, The Day Was a Scorcher pictures what Jacobs describes as "movie-star Flo, Nisi the thoughtful young girl, and Aza old enough to trudge with the rest of us, but still expecting to be pushed around on wheels," frolicking in a sun-drenched Rome in the 1970s. Explains Jacobs,...
A still image of a palm-lined wooden walkway is edited together with mirror-images, close-ups, upside-down renderings, and smaller, framed versions to create strobe-like visuals that are cut together to increasingly frenetic effect. Jacobs contrasts a lush natural space with the alienating,...
Description by Ken Jacobs: Shelley Duvall is Olive Oyl is the fourth in a series of shorts (Popeye Sees 3D; Pappy Sees 3D, Too; Sweepea’s Favorite Eternalisms. We’re crazy about both the original Popeye and the Robert Altman film but the point in evoking the one-eyed sailor was to bring...
