Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs

by Michele Pierson (Editor), David E. James (Editor), Paul Arthur (Editor)

Ken Jacobs has been making cinema for more than fifty years. Along with over thirty film and video works, he has created an array of shadow plays, sound pieces, installations, and magic lantern and film performances that have transformed how we look at and think about moving images. He is part of the permanent collections at MoMA and the Whitney, and his work has been celebrated in Europe and the U.S. While his importance is well-recognized, this is the first volume dedicated entirely to him. It includes essays by prominent film scholars along with photographs and personal pieces from artists and critics, all of which testify to the extraordinary variety and influence of his accomplishments. Anyone interested in cinema or experimental arts will be well-rewarded by a greater acquaintance with the genius, the innovation, and the optical antics of Ken Jacobs.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Evan Pincus · Rating 1 out of 5]

Contributors cite sources as diverse as Deleuze and Barthes to IMDb reviewers in an attempt to claim Jacobs as everything from Jewish mystic to contemporary Busby Berkeley, placing his habit of heckling his own films from the audience in the benshi tradition or trying to argue that "there is perhaps no thinker closer to Jacobs than Theodor Adorno." You can just say whatever you want in academia, I guess - the only analogy that lands is Fred Worden describing Jacobs as a stage magician/Wizard of Oz-ian figure; "charming fraud" seems to me to be about right. Except this book doesn't even portray him as particularly charming (he was friendly enough when I met him after a screening of his works - I was terrified, cuz I'd thought he'd have seen me throwing up my hands in anger when Orchard Street kept going, sitting as he was in the row behind me), giving generous samples of him cursing out reasonable feminist critique or shit-talking better art in far too many words. Flo is of course barely acknowledged (she appears on the back cover, which feels fitting), except in an interview with Amy Taubin that attempts to foreground her importance to "The Work;" most other contributors discuss her only in the context of her work "behind the curtain." Found the few graphic contributions most interesting - Spiegelman's comic is charming, and Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller's photo series was more compelling to me than most of Ken's work.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come.