Ken Jacobs and New York filming the mystery seek wonder

Ken Jacobs celebrated his 90th birthday on 25 May. And New York is celebrating it in a big way. Not coincidentally. In fact the city was the origin of nearly all of his cinema, beginning in 1955, fresh from service in the Coast Guard and armed with a Bell & Howell, Jacobs began filming the Lower East Side and its surrounding streets. — an immigrant neighborhood like Brooklyn, where he grew up during the Depression, and close to where he still lives with his wife and indispensable companion, Flo. From those scenes the film was made, Orchard Street – Rich in colors, smells, moods, pieces of Europe, humanity, contrasts and wonder, yet devoid of sentimentality and/or irony – seen today it is a spectacular kaleidoscope of an era and Manhattan that no longer exists.

archive Modern Art recently restored it and will be “on display” in a gallery through November 3, along with Jacobs’ other works, which are spread across his oeuvre.
A few days after his birthday, MoMA announced the acquisition of two hundred and twelve films of this author, who has always cultivated and who in turn owes his inspiration to the museum. “It was MoMA as a teenager that introduced me to the unpredictability of art,” said Jacobs, who studied painting with Hans Hoffman at the Art Students League of New York as a boy and whose collection includes 8 mm , 16mm, 35mm and digital. “Jacobs” is one of cinema’s living treasures, a writer who, together with his companion and collaborator Florence Jacobs, continually evoked the sense of wonder and mystery that 19th-century audiences must have felt when they were in front of the cinema . For the first time » the announcement of Josh Siegel, who oversaw the museum’s acquisitions.

Correct! The Jacobsian spirit, that sense of wonder and mystery—combined with the playfulness that distinguishes Jacobs’s work in a lively dialectic with his theoretical depth—is democratically, twenty-four hours a day, within sight of all passersby in New York, who find themselves here. Corner of Broadway and 10th Street.
Adding to the birthday celebrations, the New York University-owned 8WSE Gallery has actually dedicated six windows of its annex to a mega retrospective Ken Jacobs, above illusion Which is showing about a third of the movies on street-facing monitors, in three different phases, starting from April 15 to November 26. Curated by filmmaker and archivist Andrew Lampert, the retrospective also includes many of Jacobs’ early black-and-white drawings and paintings, highlighting the influences of Abstract Expressionism as well as early Cubism on his films. In fact, one of Jacobs’ fundamental passions is 3D. As Lampert writes in the presentation above illusion

Jacobs has been one of the pioneers of the notion of extended cinema from the beginning, even designing his own three-dimensional home vision system, the Nervous System, in collaboration with Flo, which is based on the use of Can be experienced without polarizing glasses. In 16mm the two projectors are capable of working in both forward and reverse phases. Over the years Flo and Ken Jacobs used images taken of the nervous system (whose “secret formula”, patented by the artist, included the use of fan blades) to give their works this three-dimensional effect. applied on. Life Images

His free manipulation of synopsis and found footage.

several Examples (one of the most fascinating) of this use of 3D. looking for the monkey kingA blockbuster from 2011, based on aluminum foil that looks just as impressive transformer) Scroll through or loop through the screens of the 80WSE gallery, with classics from years past, such as Sixties Burlesque, Made with Jack Smith, Monumental star dies (started in 1957 and ended in 2004 with a duration of six and a half hours); For the beautiful, and recently rediscovered, Akash Samajwadi

(1964-66/2019), a Orchard Street, and Jacobsian interpretations of home movies such as spaghetti aza (1975) and Nissan Ariana Window (1956).

Screenings at the Anthology Film Archive and the Light Gallery are also planned, in addition to other 90th anniversary celebrations. all pieces displayed above illusion They can also be viewed on mobile phones through QRcode. And, as the city celebrates, Ken Jacobs – who went digital in 1999 – is hard at work on new films to continually update the retrospective.