Coming Up: Ken Jacobs

"It's very hallucinatory," says avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs, frankly describing the effects of viewing one of his Nervous Magic Lantern performances. He continues, "It sounds very slow, but there is endless, uncanny and unusual amounts of motion and depth taking place. People inevitably Rorschach. They're absolutely convinced that they've seen things, but it's really a combination of what I'm projecting and what they're projecting." Jacobs, who came of age as a filmmaker in the 1960s in New York (where he and his wife, Flo, founded the Millennium Film Workshops) and participated in the wild East coast film scene alongside radical filmmakers such as Andy Warhol and Hollis Frampton, returns to LA next week for one of his incomparable performances and several screening events. On Monday, October 12, Jacobs will present the Nervous Magic Lantern performance Towards the Depths of the Even Greater Depression at REDCAT in which he manipulates projectors to create intense optical events. He has described the experience for his audience as one of group hallucination, and having seen one of his performances many years ago, I can verify that it is indeed unlike any other visual or cinematic happening I've witnessed. At once ritualistic with regard to the sense of shared experience, riveting in being totally unpredictable, and wonderfully psychedelic, Jacobs' live events reimagine cinema in honor of its key elements, namely image, time, space, motion and light. Jacobs will also screen several digital shorts at the UCLA Film & Television Archive on Thursday, October 15; on Saturday, October 17, Jacobs will co-present two shorts, one of which was made by his son, Azazel Jacobs, at LA Filmforum, and his new 3-D digital feature Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) will screen at LA Filmforum on October 18.