Program notes for Roger Jacoby screening hosted by Carnegie Museum of Art
(01/11/1977)
FILM SECTION MUSEUM OF ART CARNEGIE INSTITUTE INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER: ROGER JACOBY Tuesday, January 11, 1977 8:00 FILMOGRAPHY: Futurist Song (1969), color, silent, 2 1/2 minutes. Dream Syphinx Opera (1969-72), color,sound, 8 minutes. L'Amico Fried's Glamourous Friends (1973), color, silent, 11 minutes. Aged in Wood (1974), b&w, sound, 11 minutes. Floria (1975), color, sound, 15 minutes. Kunst Life I and II (1976), color, sound, 28 minutes. Works in progress include: Screentest for Conquest of The Universe, color, sound, 5 minutes. Lauren and Michael, color, sound, 31/2 minutes. Mary, color, sound, 10 minutes. In the black and white films there are colors which result from undissolved dyes added for sensitization during manufacturing, and from bleach, developer, and staining during processing. R.J. Roger Jacoby is a filmmaker who makes unities out of contradictions. What could be more disparate than Puccini and Andy Warhol? or more similar? One suspects that if Jacoby were faced with the prospect of being shipwrecked with a projector and only one film, that film would be by the early master D.w. Griffith — perhaps Broken Blossoms or Way Down East. Certainly his knowledge of and fascination with Griffith is extensive. And he has even taken the pains to elicit from the now ancient heroine of so many Griffith films, Lillian Gish, information which he couldn't find in the literature. Yet Griffith's great contribution to film during the 'teens was to the development of narrative film, finding the means of structuring and conveying — of "imaging” — a story both clearly and touchingly. And Jacoby's films are certainly not "narrative” in any conventional sense of that word! What Jacoby instead seems to find in the films of Griffith is the gesture, the single momentary rhythm of movement, which carries with it a world of meaning. And while some of these gestures are those of the actors or actresses, others are purely filmic rhythms — the blurred movement of the horses' feet in Birth of A Nation or in Orphans of the Storm, for instance, or even accidents which occur in reprinting the old Griffith films, which appear as brief, soft, stacatto textures on the screen. And certainly he has seen the light and the grain of the reproductions of the old Griffith prints. There is an irony in the fact that Jacoby, despite his denial of conventional narrativ-ity, by appropriating moments of film akin to the most privileged visual moments of Griffith, establishes for his own work the possibility — the implication — of narrative. Clearly Jacoby's work is not "derivative" of Griffith, in the perjor-ative sense of that term, but the association is a highly profitable one when viewing a Jacoby film. Having suggested the faintly musty aroma of Griffith, I should hasten to insist that Jacoby is a modern filmmaker — "avant-garde." (He would like that terra, suggesting as it does a tradition which includes the German Hans Richter's abstract works in the 1920s, and Marie Menken and Willard Maas' experimental films in the United States during the 1940s and 50s. As a young man, while he was still painting and studying to be a concert pianist, Jacoby knew the insep rable over 2. Menken and Maas; This was back when their New York apartment was a rallying center and source of comfort for many young New York artists, despite the 90-proof irascibility of them both, and before these two each in his/her own way entered the exalted position which they now — justifiably — hold in the history of experimental film). "Modern” painting dates from the second half of the 19th century when the Impressionists finally recognized that painting was painting — paint applied to canvas — thus flying in the face of the centuries-old misconceptions that painting was a surrogate for some other reality. Film, too, in its gravitation toward deceptive illusionism (which is still rampant in some quarters) had to be rescued from this basic misconception (or deceit); this has been in one sense the task of the entire corpus of experimental film since the 1920s. Jacoby, in his own particular fashion, stands at the recent end of this ongoing development. When Eastman Kodak first introduced their box camera in the late 19th century their newspaper and magazine advertisements read: "You push the button, we do the rest." And indeed, one needed only to send the exposed film in to the company for them to develop it and send back positive black & white prints of the images looking just like the "real" (i.e. material) world. Current Kodak advertisements on television for color processes are virtually the same as those of a century ago. ("Just like the real thing." We don’t bother to compare Kodak color to what we see "out there", but simply use Kodak as the yardstick for reality — and certainly don't question the meaning of that term). Kodak has established a strangle hold on the "look” — aesthetics?? — of film as well as of still images, and recently a few filmmaking Davids have begun to engage this corporate Goliath. Some (Paul Sharits) have magnified many times, through extreme close-up film rephotography in carefully controlled studies, the grain of the sequential film frames, exposing the intrinsic dancing energy of the dots of pigment which, viewed in rapid sequence, we normally "read" as an illusion or representation of movement Other filmmakers (Jon Rubin) have chemically assaulted the unexposed emulsion of Kodak film stock with chemical processes that would curl the collective hair of Kodak's tunnel-vision chemists (whose jobs depend upon not giving out the formulas or tolerance levels of their products). Jacoby too has been waging this battle during the past eight years, but he has done so without giving up his movie camera and the images it can record. In 1972, for financial as well as aesthetic reasons, Jacoby began developing his own film footage In the bathtub of his darkened bathroom. The results were unpredictable, to say the least, but the images which came out of that experiment were sufficiently intriguing for him to acquire a simple developing machine in 1974. Further trials led to a fair amount of footage discarded in despair, but certain segments of often accidental chemical infringement on the camera images gave exciting results. And these moments, these events on the film, with their complex interplay of seemingly 3-dimentional camera image and clearly 2-dimention-al texture and pattern, have formed the basis of the last 8 years of Jacoby's work. The results have been further enriched by Jacoby's purchase, in 1975, of a used Auricon camera which employs the now obsolete process of recording an optical sound track directly on the edge of the film as the image is being recorded; with film from this piece of equipment Jacoby's unique and sometimes bizarre developing methods develop the sound at the same time as the image. All chemical distortions to the film stock are therefore perceived in screening on the sound track (with a one second delay) as well as on the image. EXAMPLE: Out of a swirling energy of grain texture on the film there emerge two men dressed in elaborate brocade bathrobes. One of these two is recognizable as Ondine, one of the "super-stars" of such Andy Warhol films as Vinyl, Loves of Ondine, and Chelsea Girls. The hiss on the sound track gradually clears to the extent that voices are audible; an opera is being, reenacted. Are these characters following prerecorded sound (we see their mouths move)? Are they themselves the source of the sound? In fact they are, but added later and out of synch. Yet one senses that the entire sound is self-generated simply as an ineluctable 3. correllary to the presence of these two. And have these images been photographed in black and white, or does that flood and ebb of green (which our memory does so much to enhance) suggest a color process? By the time one has begun to discover the nature of this sequence, the screen images and sound track are subsumed again by shimmering film grain and by hiss. EXAMPLE: A plump woman perhaps in her 50s (does it help to know that she is the filmmaker's sister’s mother-in-law??) is modeling what appears to be a plain white off-the-rack department store dress and a grotesque pendant lion brooch. Other voices, encouraging and questioning her, are audible. The camera wanders away — looks at her feet, passes at floor level behind a chair, seems momentarily discarded as the voices continue. Who is this woman? Are these other people (whom we briefly glimpse, sometimes shoving an ancient radio microphone toward her face) sympathetic in their encouragement to her, or are they leading her on, exposing her? or both? Are the misdirections of the camera intentional and perverse obfuscations of the image we want to see, or are they a humane reflex to an embarrasing situation? These, then, are just a few of the contradictions of which Jacoby makes unity Disparate and disconnected images coalesce to evoke narrative associations; Texture and chemical color on the screen disperse to reveal, then obliterate, recognizable images — but that texture and color shares identity with those images The presence of a 2-dimensional graphic form and color can constantly be read away in favor of recognition of an illusionistic image, and vice versa; The calculating attack on the "normal" appearance of an illusionistic film image, far from being an impersonal and systematic destruction of the image, manages to enhance aspects of that image; The generous gestures of highly melodramatic and operatic moments are subdued by the chemical process of film development, but the results of that process visually correspond with or counterpoint those moments so precisely that they are reinvested with a different, and highly personal, inflection of melodrama and opera. — Bill Judson Our next Independent Filmmaker evening -will be JANUARY 25 (Tuesday) when Barry Gerson will be present to screen a selection of his films. Museum of Art Theater, 8:00. Admission: $1.00. On FRIDAY. JANUARY 28, filmmaker PETER WATKINS, well-known for his controversial British film, The War Game, will be at the Museum to screen his 1975 feature-length film, EDVARD MUNCH. This film, which has received high critical acclaim, is a personal study of ten years in the life of this Norwegian artist. Screening will take place in the Lecture Hall, 8:00. Admission: $2.00 or two booklet tickets. An informal DISCUSSION of the Watkins film will be held the following day, SATURDAY, JANUARY 29, at 1:30 PM in the University of Pittsburgh's Frick Fine Arts Building, Oakland. FREE. ALSO ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 29 — there will be a special presentation of Watkins' THE WAR GAME (1965), the "film which was banned by the BBC for its depiction of a nuclear attack upon Britain," and his 1975 video piece, The Trap, which "depicts Sweden on the eve of the year 2000, suffering the full consequences (psychological as well as physical) of having developed a total reliance on nuclear energy". Both will be presented at the University of Pittsburgh (room to be announced at the Friday screening) at 3:00 PM.
