Seeking the Monkey KingIt is all too fitting that a film series focusing on “3D in the 21st Century” should feature the work of Ken Jacobs. More than any other single avant-garde filmmaker, Jacobs has explored the pulsating, tremulous frontier where images hit the eyes, and a great deal of his exploration over the last 30+ years—beginning with his experiments with the Pulfrich filter and his development of the dual projection “Nervous System”—has involved three-dimensional illusionism, that ambiguous perceptual space where flatness and depth wrestle in the optical mind. Historically, aesthetically, and technologically, it would make no sense to consider cinema in three dimensions without including Jacobs’ contributions.But there’s more at stake in Jacobs’ presence in the Bam’s 3D series. No mere formalist, Jacobs has been a tireless artistic whistleblower, documenting and cataloging the ugliest aspects of American culture. From blackface and animal torture in Star Spangled to Death,...
- 5/11/2015
- by Michael Sicinski
- MUBI
Let Your Light ShineIt took over a century, but 3D is finally generating some cultural goodwill. With two major retrospectives of 3D filmmaking taking place next month—one at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (May 1-5), focusing on a broad range of stereoscopic experimentation throughout avant-garde history, and the other, BAMcinématek’s “3D in the 21st century” series (May 1-17), looking at both experimental and mainstream manifestations from the last fifteen years—the tenacious ‘here again/dead again’ format is apparently beginning to transcend its stigma as a box office gimmick; its capacity for new formal breakthroughs now more than ever met with inklings of trust instead of contempt. Pernicious connotations of commerce, power, and excess haven't been exorcised from 3D so much as they've been fused into its very infrastructure, opening up new opportunities for radical abstractions, poetics, disruptions, and historical inquiries to subvert grand institutions and languages from within the form itself.
- 5/1/2015
- by Blake Williams
- MUBI
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