SUNDAY, April 6

TWO BY JACOBS: Azazel and Ken
The GoodTimesKid and The Whirled (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith) with Azazel, Ken and Flo Jacobs (Approx. 96 min.)
10:00 a.m., The Byrd Theatre
Admission $5
You can thank John Mhiripiri, administrative director and exhibitions coordinator at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, for suggesting that we invite Azazel Jacobs (and his parents!) to this year’s festival. In early 2007, Anthology featured Azazel’s second feature The GoodTimesKid for a week’s run, and it made several film critics’ Best of 2007 lists. Kevin Knox of The Cinematheque sums up nicely why this screening is a “don’t miss” opportunity: “When your daddy is one of the lynchpins of experimental cinema in the United States – and the world – your future has got to be a bright one, for you too can become one of the most underrated, underexposed, unheard of by most, avant-gardist auteurs in the history of cinema.

With The GoodTimesKid, Azazel Jacobs, son of legendary, if not quite a household name, Ken Jacobs, the man responsible for the brilliantly deceptive 1969 experimental bon mot Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son and the découpage juggernaut, 40 years in the making, Star Spangled to Death, gives us (and by us I mean myself, J. Hoberman and about three other film geeks from the East Village) one of the sweetest, funniest romances of the year. A melange of his paternally encrusted experimental roots, an obvious lust for the early French New Wave, live action Fleischer Brother quirkiness, Jim Jarmusch’s brain in a jar, indie-pop licks and a screwball heart, all glazed over with a sort of low-def Boho Lubitsch touch, Jacobs’ film – which played for exactly seven days in January of 2007 at the Anthology Archives in New York and has still not seen the shiny side of a DVD – is the one film of 2007 most in need of watching – mainly because so many have not.”

The Whirled (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith)
The Following four films are early images of Jack Smith:
1. Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956),
2. Little Cobra Dance (1956)
3. Hunch Your Back (1963)
4. Death of P’Town (1961)

The first two shorts were shot around Jack’s loft on Reade Street on two 100’ rolls (Sunday morning, following Saturday’s sacrifice, I saw there was another 50’ left) in an impromptu way very different from my initial fastidious art-film approach. I would never be an art-film true-believer again. In 1963 a snatch of Saturday Afternoon ... was shown on TV when I was somehow invited to participate in a TV quiz program called Hunch Your Back (Back Your Hunch). After years of shooting my raging epic Star Spangled to Death starring Jack as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and after a few months of being on the outs with each other, we got together for one last stab at friendship and the making of a film in Provincetown, Summer of ‘61
– Ken Jacobs

KEN JACOBS RETROSPECTIVE, PART II with Ken, Flo & Azazel Jacobs
Return To The Scene Of The Crime (2008, 92 min., b/w & color, music by Malcolm Goldstein) plus a new short by Azazel Jacobs!
1:00 p.m., The Firehouse Theatre
Admission $5

Tom, Tom, the piper’s son,
Stole a pig and away he run;
The pig was eat,
And Tom was beat
And Tom ran crying down the street.

More than theft of a pig is taking place at Southwark Fair. Why does God, right there amongst the crowd, allow this cheery riffraff such liberties? I haven’t been so shocked since 1969, when I first examined this primitive 1905 movie with my camera (Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, named this year to the Library of Congress National Film Registry). A better print of the original film, and the power of the computer, allows for deeper and more detailed inspection. Forensic cinema at its most obsessive, the dead rise ... and prove quite entertaining.
– Ken Jacobs

BULLETS INTO BLOGS, SWORDS INTO POWER POINTS: OLD AND NEW MEDIA IN THE QUEST FOR PEACE with DeeDee Halleck (Approx. 2 hrs.)
Sponsored by WRIR, 97.3 FM
3:30 p.m., The Firehouse Theatre
FREE

Tactical media is creative solidarity in the fight for justice and democracy: resistance to the rampant tendencies toward repression, exploitation, isolation, alienation and corporatization.
– DeeDee Halleck

DeeDee Halleck, filmmaker, co-founder of Paper Tiger Television and the Deep Dish Satellite Network, and Professor Emeritus Department of Communication at the University of San Diego, will present a selection of provocative videos produced by Paper Tiger Television and Deep Dish Satellite Network and discuss the role that independent media can play in building community and promoting social change.

• Community Media Around the World
• Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger
• Shocking and Awful (Iraq War)
• The Last Televangelist, Rev. Billy C. Wirtz

RICHMOND INDIGENOUS GOURD ORCHESTRA plays NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922, 79 min., silent with live score)
Sponsored by Plan 9 Music
8:30 p.m., The Firehouse Theatre
$10 advance @ Plan 9 Music and JRFF events;
$15 at door Seating is limited.
Robert Flaherty’s documentary on life with the Eskimos – Itivimuits – of northern Hudson Bay set the standard for narrative nonfiction and made Nanook the Hunter an international celebrity – remember the Eskimo Pie? Flaherty’s chronicle of Nanook’s and his family’s nomadic routine in the frozen North shows man at his best, living harmoniously with his surroundings, i.e. living green in black and white. Seen it before? Hear it new with RIGO’S live accompaniment!

DONNIE DARKO: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (2004, 133 min.) with Richard Kelly
Co-sponsored by Virginia Film Office
11:30 p.m., The Byrd Theatre
Admission $5
Director Richard Kelly will introduce his widely acclaimed feature, the hallucinatory Donnie Darko, an original and dark comic turn on suburban high school late 1980s time travel angst. Referencing everything from Harvey with Jimmy Stewart, Graham Greene’s The Destructors, Marker’s La Jetée to David Lynch and post-modern doppelgangers everywhere, Donnie Darko is a surprisingly assured first outing for Midlothian native Kelly. It was initially released in 2001, and has since been accorded “official cult status.” Please join us for this very special screening.