Succinctly summarizing Ken Jacobs’s astounding career is a real challenge. A Brooklyn-raised former student of painter Hans Hofmann, Ken fell in love with cinema in his teens via screenings at the Museum of Modern Art. His decades worth of restless activity includes more than 40 films, numerous live performances (including shadow plays and other productions), countless film performances (often featuring his jaw dropping “Nervous System”, which uses specially-rigged 16mm projection to conjure remarkable 3-D depth and movement), magnificent stereo slide and “Nervous Magic Lantern” shows, and as of late, astonishing digital videos. It is Ken’s total dedication to the multiple possibilities and mutations of the moving image that binds all these seemingly disparate modes into a brilliantly co-hesive and consistent whole.
For these two very special evenings Anthology proudly premieres our new 16mm-to-35mm blow-up of the classic BLONDE COBRA and the newly preserved early work THE WHIRLED alongside two mind-boggling recent video works. The filmmaker will be on hand to guide us through this scenic route….
These shows would not be possible without the generous support of The Film Foundation, The National Film Preser-vation Foundation, Simon Lund and Cineric, Inc.

PUSHCARTS OF ETERNITY STREET
2006, additional material 2008, approx. 20 minutes, video.
1903 hand- and horse-drawn street carts on NY’s Lower East Side. Tiny movements evolve in place, caught between 2-D and 3-D.

THE WHIRLED
1956-63, 18 minutes, 16mm. Preserved with support from the National Film Preservation Foundation.
Three out of four shorts star Jack Smith. The fourth features Carolee Schneemann and Ken Jacobs.
1. Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956); 2. Little Cobra Dance (1956); 3. Hunch Your Back (1963); 4. Death of P’Town (1961).
“Following Saturday’s sacrifice in front of Jack’s loft on Reade Street (screened as shot), there was another 50’ of film left on Sunday morning and with that I filmed Jack’s Little Cobra Dance. Playtime was different from my usual fastidious approach and, seeing the results, I would never be an art-film true-believer again. In 1963 a moment of Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice was shown on a TV program called Hunch Your Back. (Back Your Hunch?) Jack and I got together for one last stab at friendship and filmmaking in Provincetown, Summer ‘61.” –K.J.

BLONDE COBRA
1959-63, 35 minutes, 16mm-to-35mm blow-up. Preserved with funding provided by The Film Foundation.
Arranged by Jacobs from footage shot by Bob Fleischner, BLONDE COBRA features a disarming, manically hysteri-cal performance by Jack Smith, amongst other revelries. One of the most radical films of the 1960s.

“BLONDE COBRA is an erratic narrative – no, not really a narrative, it’s only stretched out in time for conven-ience of delivery. It’s a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust. Silly, self-pitying, guilt-strictured and yet tri-umphing – on one level – over the situation with style…enticing us into an absurd moral posture the better to dismiss us with a regal ‘screw off.’” –K.J.

“BLONDE COBRA, undoubtedly, is the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema, and it is a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy. I think it is one of the great works of personal cinema.” –Jonas Mekas

THE SCENIC ROUTE
2008, 25 minutes, video.
“One of the nice things about movies was you could keep them at a distance. Movies knew their place. We were di-mensional, 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.” –K.J.
Total running time: ca. 105 minutes.