A Ken Jacobs Celebration
Star Spangled To Death

January 22 to 25, 2004

New York filmmaker and “film performance artist” Ken Jacobs has been one of the central figures of the New American Cinema since the late 1950s. Alongside Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, he has been engaged in an aesthetic-political film practice which attacks the American cinema consensus. From January 22 to 25, Jacobs' works will be at the centre of a joint programme put together by the Film Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK). In addition to some of his classic works such as Blonde Cobra (1963) and Perfect Film (1986), Jacobs will also be presenting one of his current "Shadowplay" performances.

The highlight in this series, starting at 3 p.m. on Sunday, January 25, will be the European premiere of his most recent film/video epic Star Spangled to Death. Begun in 1957, completed in a first version in 1959 (but never released), SSTD was expanded in recent years. It came to a head in the summer of 2003 and was enriched with image and text commentary on the present political situation in the USA. 400 minutes of truly radical “video cinema”, starring Jack Smith in the role of "The Spirit not of Life but of Living". A masterpiece.