Ken Jacobs • United States • 1969 • One of Ken Jacobs' great experiments in photography and editing.
Ken Jacobs started experimenting with found footage, expanding a five-minute fragment of Billy Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1905) to feature length. In Jacobs’s words—“Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead... I wanted to 'bring to the surface' that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape... to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself—a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still... stirred to life by a successive 16-24 frame-per-second pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite..." Restored in 2K by the Museum of Modern Art.
Up Next in Michael Almereyda
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Walden
Jonas Mekas • United States • 1969 • An epic and intimate document of 1960s New York.
A 27-year-old Lithuanian émigré sets out to film his life as it unfolds. In six reels, we encounter several chapters—including the 1960s New York arts scene, featuring many of the filmmaker’s friends: Stan Brak...
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Goodbye to Language
Jean-Luc Godard • 2014 • France-Switzerland
A beguiling video-essay on the experience of being-in-the-world—refracted through the eyes of several young lovers, and a dog.
A small town on the shores of Lak...
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A Touch of Sin
Jia Zhangke • China • 2013 • Four ordinary citizens are driven to the brink of violence
A local boss runs a small village in China’s northern Shanxi province. He’s gotten rich selling collective property, and...
