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Perpetual Motion | Ken Jacobs’ Nervous Magic Lantern (CANCELED)

SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE and GRAY AREA present PERPETUAL MOTION, the largest convergence of international, multi-generational performance cinema practitioners ever assembled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The series is presented September 16–December 7, 2016. All performances at Gray Area.

Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond our control, this performance event with filmmaker Ken Jacobs has been CANCELLED. Please join San Francisco Cinematheque on January 27, 2017 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as Cinematheque kicks off its 2017 exhibition season with a special screening of Ken Jacobs’ Two Wrenching Departures (2006).

Tickets: $10 Presale / $15 Day of Show / $20 at the Door

Eisenstein said the power of film was to be found between shots. Peter Kubelka seeks it between film frames. I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain. A whole new play of appearances is possible here.
—Ken Jacobs

The cinema of Ken Jacobs—an artist working unstoppably since the mid-1950s—is endlessly deconstructive, endlessly pulling apart. Early film works with performance artist Jack Smith shattered dramatic filmmaking into abject and inspiring shards, while his 1969 film Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son constructed elaborate new narratives and explored worlds abstracted from a 1905 short film. Always in Jacobs’ work is there a restless inquiry into the ideological and material elements of the film viewing experience, with an eye toward smashing preconceived notions of cinema in favor of critical engagement and a renewed sense of possibility.

Performing live in San Francisco for the first time in over two decades, Ken Jacobs appears in San Francisco with his Nervous Magic Lantern. Inspired by Victorian-era shadowplay and the artist’s extensive investigations of the mechanics and aesthetics of three-dimensionality, the Nervous Magic Lantern is a post-cinematic projection device, a pulsing and breathing imaging system and a conjuror of ecstatic vision, presenting immersive visual journeys into a paradoxically grounded and ephemeral abstract space. Tonight Jacobs presents the world premiere a new feature-length performance, the torrential Thunderclouds, a blinking and rumbling transcontinental dialog between the downpours of Manhattan and the rainstorms of San Francisco, presented in quadraphonic sound. Thunderclouds is preceded by the short film Cyclops Observes the Heavenly Bodies—“Cyclopean 3D is the most 3D a single eye can come up with. This means the celestial horde on display here can only seem to be galloping through space. Actual seeing into depth must be denied, it’s the law.”

NOTE: This program is not recommended for those photosensitive epilepsy and similar conditions.

This program is presented in association with the BAMPFA, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Ken Jacobs performs Abstract Expressionist Cinema
at BAMPFA on Wednesday, October 12 and will speak on the works of painter Hans Hofmann at BAMPFA on Saturday, October 15, also at BAMPFA.

Performance Cinema: an exciting and emergent genre of avant-garde moving-image art which represents a crucial attack on the sterility of the contemporary, digitally-located media environment, arguing for the embodied, collective consideration of real-time, site-specific media experiences. Through mis-used or modified analog film projectors, live video synthesis and physical interaction with the media interface, performance cinema practitioners variously burn, etch, mutilate and destroy projected film, machinery and the image itself. Performance Cinema practitioners create immersive spectacles of sight and sound, opening a space for questioning and contemplating visual culture through direct activation of the senses. As a dynamic, regenerating and resurrecting media experience, Performance Cinema exists only in the moment of perception and is truly an art of its time. Full series information available here.

Artists

Ken Jacobs

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1933. He studied painting with Hans Hofmann, one of the prime creators of Abstract Expressionism,, in the mid-1950s. It was then that he also began filmmaking with Star Spangled To Death. His personal star rose, to just about knee high, with the sixties advent of Underground Film. In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic—rather than demagogic—cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. A nonprofit filmmaker’s co-operative open to all, it made available film equipment, workspace, screenings and classes at little or no cost. Later he found himself teaching large classes of painfully docile students at St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens. In 1969, after a week's guest seminar at Harpur College (now SUNY Binghamton), students petitioned the Administration to hire Ken Jacobs. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, the Administration—during that special period of anguish and possibility—decided that, as a teacher, he was "a natural." Together with Larry Gottheim he organized the SUNY system's first Department of Cinema, teaching thoughtful consideration of every kind of film but specializing in avant garde cinema appreciation and production. (Department graduates are world-recognized as having an exceptional presence in this field.) His own early studies under Hofmann would increasingly figure in his filmwork, making for an Abstract Expressionist cinema, clearly evident in his avant garde classic Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969) and increasingly so in his subsequent devising of the unique Nervous System series of live film-projection performances. The American Museum Of The Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, hosted a full retrospective of his work in 1989. The New York Museum Of Modern Art held a partial retrospective in 1996, as did The American House in Paris in 1994 and the Arsenal Theater in Berlin in 1986 (during his 6 month stay as guest-recipient of Berlin's DAAD award). He has also performed in Japan, at the Louvre in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, etc. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant.

Partner

San Francisco Cinematheque

Founded in 1961, San Francisco Cinematheque cultivates the international field of non-commercial artist-made cinema through curated exhibitions, through the creation of publications and by maintaining a publicly accessible research archive. Cinematheque’s work inspires aesthetic dialog between artists, stimulates critical discourse, and encourages appreciation of artist-made cinema across the broader cultural landscape. With a grounding in non-commercial, non-narrative and non-documentary filmmaking traditions, Cinematheque’s programs broaden the public’s understanding of non-mainstream artistic filmmaking practice while expanding and challenging established art- and film historical traditions.