- Venue
- Chisenhale Gallery
- Location
When can the duration of a film ever prove itself to be of scant relevance to its content and our experience of it? Such an example must only be rarely found in cinema. One particularly remarkable example is Ken Jacob’s epic eight hour film Star Spangled To Death (1957-59/2004) screened at the Chisenhale Gallery over the entirety of one day, with breaks at specific points indicated wittily by the snippets of Jacob’s text that appear throughout the film. With the backdrop of the recently decided US presidential election, screening Jacob’s film, a prodigious accumulation of black and white found films, documentaries, newsreels, musicals and cartoons dating from the mid-1950s, the content finds a new prescience and urgency. Underscored by explicit comparisons between the Bush regime and the stifling cultural and political climate of 1950s America, Star Spangled To Death is a social critique and indictment of American politics, war, religion and racism, a collage of readymade footage, some widely recognised and popularised, some much less so, arranged by the filmmaker and presented in non-chronological, episodic portions. A documentary of a colonialist African expedition is shown in full, followed by a 1950’s CBS programme called “Conquest” exploring the scientific origins and mechanisms of love through a multitude of experiments on caged Rhesus monkeys in a laboratory. Watching never becomes an endurance test, in fact time appears to be merely a background concern or reality. It becomes apparent that it is neither necessary to start watching from the beginning or finish watching right at the end. Jacobs’ idea of an “indeterminate cinema” is embodied in this film, where the multifarious experiences and reactions that it engenders in the individual are as much inscribed in the irreverent spirit of the filmmaking. Doing away with order and chronology is Jacobs’ tangible reaction to the political and cultural restraint of the time, a way to invoke the nascent, insouciant Beat generation spirit of the late 1950s. Whilst the idea of striving for an “indeterminacy” of cinema exemplifies and presents the reasoning for Jacobs’ stitching together of diverse pieces of found footage, the film seems to complete the picture for the spectator in terms of the sensibility of the film as a whole in a particularly light hearted, and humorous (at least superficially) manner. Interspersed within the episodes are a series of improvised performances; the only parts of the film conceived and directed by Jacobs. The part bohemian, part drag-queen characters of the actors Jack Smith and Jerry Sims perform with spontaneous actions on the Manhattan streets with makeshift industrial materials. Their impromptu, theatrical gestures can be considered to be a material embodiment of how Jacobs “explodes” prescribed cinematic structures, partly influenced by his artistic practice as a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. Both the actors’ gestures and the collage that makes up the entirety of Star Spangled To Death work by acting as marks, or more particularly, by participating in an authorial markmaking of American history that Jacobs creates for us to be surprised and humoured by, reassess or question anew. Duration is merely a matter of numbers.
