Revisiting Ken Jacobs' CYCLOPEAN 3D for Home Movie Day

A STEREOSCOPIC IMAGE OF KEN AND FLO JACOBS, AS IT APPEARS IN KEN JACOBS’ 2012 EXPERIMENTAL “HOME MOVIE” CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN.

For last year’s Home Movie Day, GME highlighted Hollywood icon Rock Hudson, who appears in Mark Rappaport’s found footage video essay ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES. This year, we turn our attention to an avant-garde icon, Ken Jacobs, whose experimental “home movie” CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN was produced by GME through the Experimental Filmmakers Production Fund. GME President Jon Gartenberg presented CYCLOPEAN 3D the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, where he dubbed the film Jacobs’ “most directly autobiographical work to date.”

As noted on Home Movie Day’s official website, this yearly celebration was started in 2002 by a group of film archivists concerned about what would happen to home movies shot on film during the 20th century. The first Home Movie Day happened on August 16th, 2003, and “has grown into a worldwide celebration of not only amateur film, but also home movies on analog or digital videotape, as well as newer forms of personal documentary and expressive media… HMD screenings focus on community and personal histories in a meaningful way.” In CYCLOPEAN 3D, Jacobs creates a new kind of “home movie,” in which he mines his own archive of stereoscopic still images of family and friends taken between the late 1960s and 1975 and re-presents them in film form as 3D time-based portraits. In addition to Jacobs’s family (Flo, Aza, and Nisi), the avant-garde luminaries include Michael Snow, Richard Foreman, Jerry Sims, and Amy Taubin, to name only a few.

GME’s work on CYCLOPEAN 3D is part of a larger initiative to provide strategic advice to independent producers and contemporary experimental filmmakers about creative projects, extending from their production phase through to distribution strategies and exhibition platforms. GME’s objective is to help cutting-edge filmmakers expand their visibility in the marketplace.

To view scenes from CYCLOPEAN 3D, click here. To learn more about GME’s production projects, click here.