The revered avant-garde filmmaker (Star Spangled to Death) and “paracinema” champion has a repertory of techniques to realize astonishing optical effects. In his live 3-D shows, Jacobs variously manipulates a film projector’s mechanisms, painted plastic cells, and sometimes objects, to summon otherworldly abstractions with vertiginous depth of field. “My self-constructed ‘Lantern’ uses neither film nor video,” he explains. “Abstraction can offer the opportunity to meet and grapple directly with risky situations, taking real chances instead of identifying with some actor-proxy on a movie set. The question of what we are looking at 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. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination.” Jacobs is also screening Disorient Express (1906/1996, 30 min., 35mm, silent).

In person: Ken Jacobs

Curated by Steve Anker. This screening is part of a weeklong residency by Jacobs at CalArts, UCLA and Los Angeles Filmforum.