#experimental-cinema

#experimental-cinema

When I was a kid, I was painting, as a few of my classmates were, because my teacher was a painter. We were making paintings and different things as well - silkscreens for dances or basketball games, mobiles ... It was around 1963, so a lot of different types of artistic endeavours were happening, which played into what he was teaching us. That was kind of where I started.

Seeing a film in what the venue calls "shared reality" can be all-encompassing and yet intimate as well as communal and, if everything works out, somewhat thoughtful. The 87-foot diameter spherical screen wraps above, below and behind us, but an emphasis on couch seating invites a cooperative environment. And guests are encouraged, for instance, to pull out their phones and capture and share the moment.

Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn on May 25, 1933, to divorced parents. His mother, an artist, died when he was seven, leaving his father, a former minor league baseball player, to raise him. Jacobs graduated from the City University of New York and, following a two-year stint in the Coast Guard, briefly studied painting under Hans Hofmann. A frequent attendee of Cinema 16, which regularly showed avant-garde works, he turned his Modernist-trained eye toward creating what he would describe as 'Abstract Expressionist cinema.'

Appearing in 1974, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde invented a tradition and created a history for a field that was generally regarded, except by a few zealots, as an obscure backwater. Visionary Film opens with founding mother Maya Deren, goes on to explicate her heirs Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, ruminates on the radical nature of underground movies and Harry Smith's arcane animations, and concludes with a formalist tendency the author himself had identified several years before and named "Structural Film."