Ken Jacobs "Return to LH6"
Light Industry
This event has ended.
"Binghamton, 1969 to 2002. I started in LH1, a much larger room than LH6, hundreds of students but most expected to see only popular movies and a reflection of their own casual and superior attitudes. They weren't the only defiantly stupid ones (seeing that nothing is more worth critical attention than the phenomena of cinema). Established teachers had railed against a Cinema Department before I arrived as a further appeasement of spoiled and rebellious students and a desecration of the discipline of teaching. They had gone off-campus to complain to the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, turds that supported the slaughter of Vietnamese and decried the influx of NewYorkCommieFagNiggerlovingJews, and allies in the protection of students from persons arrested for the screening of Flaming Creatures.
I then believed that anyone could become a real student (wrong!), just as I was an anyone that had become a teacher. I had prepared by attending The Laff Movie on 42nd Street. It had first influenced my making of Star Spangled to Death and now my teaching. I can't recall the advertising of specific films on the marquee. It was a place for poor men to sleep off a drunk while old comedies were screened, sometimes entire films and sometimes comic sections of films. Film clips! This was indeed revolutionary thinking. One standard applied: whatever was selected had been thoroughly dismissed from public memory, certainly from the few film-history books that then existed. The great nameless and unthanked anti-snob curator of The Laff Movie, my mystery Professor! Thou scummy and dreary University, where hot dogs and candy bars and drinks were hawked up and down the aisles during screenings, only you, for a quarter, showed me the pre-code Thirties, introducing me to the real Eddy Cantor and Jimmy Durante and Busby Berkeley in their pre-code prime, when they were forces.
I expanded on the Laff Movie selections so one never knew what to expect and I disapproved of introductions: students were expected to grapple, and then there'd be talk, lots of it. Assuming I still have something of my teaching chops, you're welcome to sit in on a re-creation of cinema studies in LH6. (I would sometimes screen some of my own stuff so there just might be samplings and discussion of recent Ken Jacobs work.)"
- KJ
Media
Schedule
March 17, 2009 from 19:30