Afterimage: Ken Jacobs

October 12–15, 2016

Filmmaker Ken Jacobs visits from New York to present a Nervous Magic Lantern performance, which uses pre-cinema technology to create startling, mesmerizing images, and a lecture on his teacher, painter Hans Hofmann.

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Saturday, October 15, 1 PM
Ken Jacobs, Search for the Real / Delight with Illusion

Unfortunately, Ken Jacobs had to cancel his previously announced visit to the Bay Area. We will instead present a recorded version of his planned lecture along with a selection of his films, influenced by Hans Hofmann.

BAMPFA

Lecture

Past Films

Nervous Magic Lantern Performance: Abstract Expressionist Cinema
Wednesday, October 12 7 PM
Introduced by Steve Anker.
A program of films by Ken Jacobs. (Unfortunately, Ken Jacobs had to cancel his previously announced visit to the Bay Area.)
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Afterimage: Ken Jacobs

Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation

October 12–15, 2016

We are delighted to welcome New York filmmaker Ken Jacobs for a week of Bay Area events. He will present two Nervous Magic Lantern performances, which use pre-cinema technology to create startling, mesmerizing images, and a lecture on his teacher, painter Hans Hofmann. Following our Wednesday evening program, Jacobs will be in conversation with film curator Steve Anker.

“Hollywood might do well to learn from Ken Jacobs, who can boast more than forty years of provocative, demanding, and transformative explorations of various permutations of 3D, putting the primitive, in-your-face assaults of Hollywood to shame. . . . Jacobs deploys 3D technology as part of a larger, lifelong exploration of vision, consciousness, and the materiality of cinema, even in its incredibly ephemeral manifestations” (Holly Willis). Jacobs himself observes: “The viewer of Nervous Magic Lantern phenomena plunges, hovers, sinks, and rises into illusionary deep space. The question of what we are looking at, tantalizingly suggestive as appearances might be, becomes of less urgency than from where in space we are viewing and where and of what consistency and shape and size is the mass confronting us at any one moment, and when and how did it become what a moment ago it was not. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination. My self-constructed ‘lantern’ utilizes neither film nor video.”

Kathy Geritz, Film Curator

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Presented in conjunction with San Francisco Cinematheque and Gray Area, which will present a second Nervous Magic Lantern performance on Tuesday, October 11, sfcinematheque.org.

Ken Jacobs’s visit is presented as part of Afterimage: Filmmakers and Critics in Conversation, made possible by generous funding from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association®.

Afterimage: Ken Jacobs

October 12–15, 2016

Past Events

Ken Jacobs, Search for the Real / Delight with Illusion

Past Films

Nervous Magic Lantern Performance: Abstract Expressionist Cinema