The Documentarian

The Wobbly Films of Ken Jacobs

I wrote a short piece for The Rumpus about the films of Ken Jacobs. I saw the films of Ken Jacobs at a Light Industry screening in Sunset Park on March 17. These films document. So I would call them documentaries. They document the effects of visual stimuli. But they also document people, like Bob Fleischer Dying, which was a portrait of a man in a blue shirt sitting in a chair. As we walked out of the screening hall, I was still carrying my beer. There was a young man walking in front of us holding up a camera that was attached to a long stick pointed at us. He made it look like he was just walking down the stairs, but he was filming us. "We're in art," Michael said. I think the man was filming us because we were walking with Amy Taubin, the film critic. Everybody was in the movies that night.