Sunday, August 21 between 2 and 5 pm in the afternoon, Los Angeles Filmforum and LA 3D Club present avant-garde stereoscopic film maker Ken Jacobs at the Downtown Independent Theater. Excerpts from Jacobs’s 3D work will be shown and projected in both polaroid (dual) digital stereo on a silver screen and anaglyph. Selections will include excerpts from New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903 (1975), Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise (2005), Anaglyph Tom (2008) and more recent experimental work with Elbow Dance, Space Flaws and From Berkeley to San Francisco (2010).
Ken Jacobs has been making experimental and “underground” films in New York City for over fifty years. With over thirty film and video works, Jacobs has also created 3D shadow plays,stereoscopic magic lantern performances, art installations and sound pieces that deal with film, cinema history and the nature of the moving image. Jacobs’ works have been canonized in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art which included him on its list of “100 Greatest Artist of the 20th Century.”
For decades, Jacobs has also explored stereoscopic aspects of cinema and how we see the motion picture image, inferring depth from a planar screen. Jacobs was inspired to become a 3D filmmaker early in his career by the painter Hans Hofmann. The act of filmmaking, for Jacobs, is an interrogation of both space and time. “When he talks about what he learned from Hofmann, Jacobs most often talks about how Hofmann’s teaching provided him with a context for exploring ideas about space,” observes Michele Pierson. “As it was for the cubists, the challenge for the artist, as Hofmann saw it, was to render space as movement, as the penetration of one moment into another; in a word, to render it in time.”
The 3D screening will be punctuated with discussions and Q&A sessions between Jacobs, Filmforum’s Adam Hyman and film historian Ray Zone. The event represents a rare opportunity for students of stereoscopic cinema and experimental film to meet with and see the work of an American independent film pioneer. Info: LA3Dclub.com
$5 at the door for current LA3DClub members
$10 at the door for non-members (admission is waived with USC Student ID)
Free to Filmforum Members
Rooftop reception following the event
Downtown Independent Theater
251 S. Main St., Los Angeles, CA 90012
Note: Paid parking is available at many parking lots in the adjacent area and street parking is free on Sundays. The theater is also only several blocks from the MTA Red Line.
