"Window" / THE SKY SOCIALIST

ABOUT THE FILMS:

“Window,” 1964, Dir. Ken Jacobs, 12 Mins, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, USA

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice.

FORMAT: DCP

THE SKY SOCIALIST, 1965, Dir. Ken Jacobs, 90 Mins, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, USA

“The film is in sections to be shown separately; this is the central, longest ‘panel,’ within which the story can be said to be complete. It is a story of impossible love that emerges through the preoccupation with space and pattern shaping by way of camera-manipulation; my approach to film is that of a painter (abstract-expressionist) rather than dramatist. Other sections are asides, obsessions with details, excursions.” —Ken Jacobs

FORMAT: DCP