GME Associate Fred Riedel's Documentary On Ken and Flo Jacobs Screens in Venice

STILL FROM KEN JACOBS: FROM ORCHARD STREET TO THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART (2023), DIRECTED BY GME ASSOCIATE FRED RIEDEL. SOURCE: LA BIENNALE DE VENEZIA.

Beginning tomorrow, September 6th, 2023, through the following day (September 7th), the feature-length documentary KEN JACOBS: FROM ORCHARD STREET TO THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART screens at the Venice International Film Festival in the Venice Classics section. GME associate Fred Riedel, a former student and longtime friend of Ken Jacobs, produced, directed, shot, and edited the film.

In program notes for the Venice Film Festival, Riedel remarked:

This is the third film in a series I’ve made exploring the creative process in a purposefully low-key manner that permits me an unusual degree of one-on-one intimacy with my subject over a long period of time. I have known Ken Jacobs since I was a student of his in the 1970s. I later distributed several of his films and curated screenings and collections in NY (at P.S.1, the Bleecker Street Cinema, NYPL, etc.) which included his work. It was primarily his films, especially TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON (1969), that changed my view of cinema and led me back to his art again and again. At an outdoor screening Ken presented at MoMA during the pandemic, I was struck by the sudden realization that I needed to make this film.

KEN JACOBS: FROM ORCHARD STREET TO THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART features Jacobs alongside his wife and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Flo Jacobs, and their son Azazel Jacobs, himself an accomplished narrative filmmaker.

As delineated in the Venice Film Festival program notes:

[Ken and Flo Jacobs] sit down for a series of discussions [in this film], reflecting on numerous clips from the many films and performances conjured onto screens since 1955 and through to today. From the antic collaborations with Jack Smith and company as a central artist in the 1960s underground film movement, through later, seminal, ground-breaking formalist works which expanded his recognition by The Museum of Modern Art and other major cultural institutions, to his invention of the Nervous System and the Cyclopean 3D patented Eternalism and remarkable musical collaborations (with JG Thirlwell, Aki Onda, Nisi Jacobs, Michael Schumacher, and others) of his recent work, Jacobs demonstrates and articulates his endless fascination and pursuit of exceptional, moving image art.

GME is a longtime friend and collaborator of Jacobs and produced his 2012 film CYCLOPEAN #3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN through the Experimental Filmmakers Production Fund. Some scenes from that film can be viewed here. For a longer (5 minute) excerpt, click here.