Press release for screening of Roger Jacoby's Kunst Life
(11/22/1977)
PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE PRESS RELEASE
On Tuesday, November 22, 1977, Roger Jacoby will show for the first time in Pittsburgh the completed Kunst Life, Parts 1-4, the new film he has been working on for the past two years with assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts. Jacoby's major opus will be screened in the PFMI Screening Room at 205 Oakland Avenue. Admission will be $1.50. The program will also include some as yet unnamed other new works.
One of Jacoby's significant innovations as a film-maker was his decision to process his film himself, and not rely on the standardized, and expensive, processing offered by commercial laboratories. This has lent his work a very distinctive quality, described in part by Carmen Vigil, of the Canyon Cinematheque in San Francisco (in a soon-to-be published article):
Jacoby's films may be most properly described as dramatic narratives, since they contain images of human beings (however augmented or obscured by Jacoby's distinct photochemical treatment) who more or less speak lines of dialogue. . . . (but) drama isn't the main object of his presentation, rather a component in Jacoby's total formal approach to film.
There is the film grain. The sometimes lovely and sometimes not beautiful but nearly always exquisite collisions of light and shadow upon the screen which seduces us and takes us into a whole new world. And may as likely cause one to squirm in one's seat.
With a quickness of breath and dryness of the throat one is apt to say, "What is that!" as if peering into some exotic fog, not sure if one may trust his own eyes.
Because in ordinary narrative the viewer is necessarily focused upon the progression of the drama, all other portions of the sound and image tracks function as mood and background accompaniments to plot and character development. However, with Jacoby's films, one is obliged to take in the whole screen, while there is constant tension between sound and image, between the verbal information and the ever shifting grain patterns. . . .
Jacoby's films have been screened at Millenium Film Workshop and at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, and early next year they will be screened at the Museum of Modern Art in the Cineprobe Series. Earlier this year he exhibited at Carnegie Institute here in Pittsburgh.
This screening is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For more information contact Robert Haller at the above telephone number.
P O BOX 7200, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA 15213 4 1 2 - 68 1 -5449
