sunday, october 30, 6 pm: star spangled to death (ken jacobs)

pirate cinema berlin sebastian at rolux.org
Sat Oct 29 07:46:34 UTC 2016


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.

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                                                            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

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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

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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

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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

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