Screen Picks

Adams on flim.

by Sam Adams

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Star Spangled to Death (Thu., Jan. 10, 6 p.m., free, Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St., armcinema25.com) A tattered crazy quilt stitched together from found footage, news reports and Hollywood movies, Ken Jacobs' Star Spangled to Death is the rare enterprise that truly deserves to be called a life's work. Started in 1957, the movie was released several times, but Jacobs kept adding to and reshaping his creation, until, in 2004, he declared the nearly seven-hour epic complete. Jacobs reserves the right to revise and extend his remarks, but for now, Star Spangled exists in temporarily static form as a DVD that will be screened by Andrew's Video Vault.

Sprawling and unwieldy by design, the film incorporates large swaths of undigested footage: Nixon's Checkers speech; a racist documentary on a pair of benevolent safari explorers who lend a hand to smiling, primitive Africans; a CBS documentary purporting to provide a scientific explanation of love. But Jacobs smuggles in his own point of view, either through crafty audio/visual juxtapositions or onscreen manifestos. Jacobs concerns himself particularly with exhuming those parts of Hollywood's own history it has attempted to efface, like the "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" number from 1934's Wonder Bar, with a blackface Al Jolson pondering a hereafter where pork chops grow on trees. Seemingly incongruous fragments find their rhymes reels later; watching Jolson strut his stuff, you flash back to the excerpt from Oscar Micheaux's God's Step Children, where a light-skinned black couple in evening dress watch a pair of black nightclub comics, their faces darkened with burnt cork, recast their race as a cruel joke.

Against his trawl through the dark side of history, which runs all the way through Rudy Giuliani's appearance before the 9/11 Commission, Jacobs presents the figures of his 1950s contemporaries, Jerry Sims and Jack Smith, who explore a world of abandoned rooftops and crumbled buildings. Years before Flaming Creatures, Smith appears as a figure out of time whom Jacobs dubs The Spirit Not of Life but of Living. As the film circles through the Depression and the present, Smith stands astride the tide of history, his very existence an act of the kind of resistance Jacobs means to provoke. Like the country it celebrates and laments, Star Spangled is constantly in danger of falling prey to its own obsessions, but its singularity is beyond dispute.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)