O say can you see
Ken Jacobs takes a long look at a nation that is Star Spangled to Death

By Dennis Harvey

IF FAHRENHEIT 9 /11 is the screaming headline of this media moment, an angry op-ed screed in a pop format, then Ken Jacobs's Star Spangled to Death might be labeled its perfect graduate-dissertation complement. Jacobs's massive project is a deconstructive read of America as concept, ideology, history, betrayal, and ongoing hypocrisy. It comes complete with examples to illustrate a sweeping thesis and is fully footnoted.

You won't be hearing these two works mentioned together often. After all, Michael Moore's film is currently making conservatives worry in 860-plus theaters near you, while Jacobs's won't likely stir protest in its one-day gig at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts under San Francisco Cinematheque auspices. Not to mention the fact that the latter is some six and a half hours long and has been around in one form or another since the '50s. Star Spangled to Death is at least as key a work in American avant-garde cinema as Fahrenheit may prove to be in screen-activism annals. Moore aims for the widest possible audience; Jacobs is a reluctant underground star who's always surprised at having any audience, period.

Yet Jacobs is more of an entertainer than the experimental imprimatur would suggest. That's particularly the case in Star Spangled to Death, which forsakes the pure structuralism found in some of his other milestones, like the 1969-to-'71 Tom, Tom the Piper's Son (a 1905 Biograph one-reeler rephotographed, freeze-framed, and minutely scrutinized for 90 mesmerizing minutes) and 1963's Blonde Cobra, a portrait of Flaming Creatures creator Jack Smith crafted from another filmmaker's prior footage. Nor is it ever going to be as inaccessibly rarefied as Jacobs's live performance pieces, including the "Nervous System" dual-projection apparatus he's developed to create a pulsing, hallucinatory 3-D effect. Indeed, Star Spangled to Death will be more accessible than anything Jacobs has done when it receives – sometime soon, we're assured – a DVD release. At which point, he says, it will be complete, done, finito.

That may seem unremarkable, but keep in mind that Star Spangled to Death is the Rip van Winkle of avant-garde legends. Its original footage was shot between 1957 and '59. Jacobs began the project when he was 24 years old; in 1960 he assembled a rough cut with additional found-footage elements, hoping to lure backers. Their disinterest was deafening, the moment perhaps a little too soon. A few years later – with '60s "underground" cinema exploding – Jacobs thought his magnum opus was already dated. But he persevered. Occasionally exhibited in "unfinished" forms, Star Spangled to Death edged toward something resembling completion just last year, when Jacobs decided to transfer all materials to video. If future donors bankroll getting the whole whatsit back onto celluloid (warning: not cheap), we will all be grateful.

But meanwhile there's this amazing, sprawling, 40-odd-years-in-the-making objet d'art, which is populist and boho-elitist and probably somewhat Marxist (both kinds) all at once. Born in the depths of the Eisenhower era – East Village outrage cum disdain toward the oppressive straight world oozes from every frame – Star Spangled to Death easily stretches from then to now. The cold war has merely been replaced by the war on terror, prosperous middle-class '50s complacency by downwardly-mobile numbness. One difference between Jacobs and Moore is that the latter – whether from idealism or egotism – still believes America can be "America" once again. Jacobs might ask: When was it ever? The deep-dyed pessimism at this epic survey's heart suggests an illusion factory bigger than (though complicit with) Hollywood, a collective self founded on injustice and lies.

And candy. Star Spangled to Death is both more bitter and a lot more fun a social-political-cultural indictment than Fahrenheit 9/11. Jacobs serves up a heaping plate of Velveeta cheese bites stolen from decades of escapist movies, TV, radio shows, and novelty records. Anticipating the tactics of culture-detritus archivists like Rick Prelinger and appropriation artists like Craig Baldwin, Jacobs deploys a wealth of absurd, embarrassing, kitschy artifacts that reveal much more than how quickly bad art (or propaganda) dates. Unlike most latter-day types, however, he uses whatever he's found pretty much at its original length, sans external commentary, letting history hang itself.

Thus these many hours are enlivened by jaw-dropping vintage brainwash diversions, including a Warner Bros. short with wussy crooner Dick Powell extolling NRA support as one way to help lick that goshdurn Great Depression. Archaic black-and-white cooch dancers reduce the movement vocabularies of many nations to smoker's-lounge toplessness. Some forgotten songstress's enthusiastic put-over of the '40s Hit Parade obscurity "Are You Havin' Any Fun?" channels "Don't Worry, Be Happy" into jitterbuggery.

The sarcastic frame placed on somatizing Hollywood product and general media disinformation grows more explicit as Jacobs includes campaign flotsam, shedding golden light on favorite targets. Among them are a shameless God's-gift promo for aspiring politico Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon's infamous Checkers speech (made when he and Ike were running against that radical Adlai Stevenson), plus a few faster digs at the Bushes.

Beyond bad religion and worse elected leadership, what gets Jacobs's goat is our long history of soft-pedaling racism. A Robert Joseph Flaherty-like adventure documentary chronicles missionaries bidding adieu to "the simple and primitive people" of an Africa that, thank the Lord, now knows enough to use lye soap against those jungle germs. The last of the great blackface exploiters, Al Jolson, is seen "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" in a lavish production number. Vaudevillian Ted Lewis croons "Me and My Shadow" with the latter cast as a grinning, silent black man. Uncle Tom's Cabin is reenvisioned with animals in a ridiculing cartoon version; an early, antic minstrel show-ish Mickey Mouse works a chain gang, busts out of jail, then is happily dragged back to his cell trilling "There's No Place like Home."

Threaded through this sculpted junkyard of toxic audiovisual waste are staged sequences starring Jacobs's fellow late-'50s New York City dropouts from the rat race (mostly abstract expressionist painters). They enact a Beckett cum Alfred Jarry parable of anarchist street-theater actions and brownstone inner-courtyard clown dramatics. Smith is the manic "Spirit Not of Life but of Living," clad in plastic-wrap finery. His personal rebellion through spectacle provides contrast to emaciated Jerry Sims's bluntly named Suffering, a universal fall guy who expects the worst and thus deserves it. Passersby are nonplussed, even angered by these vaguely commie high jinks; actual cops investigate just what kind of subversion is taking place. On the other hand, park bums and assorted children have no trouble spontaneously joining in.

These glistening B&W (sometimes color) scenes, shot on 16mm short ends, sport some of the drag Dionysian chaos Smith wrought in his own later experimental works, though Jacobs can't help exercising relative compositional and editorial sense. As Star Spangled to Death hesitates toward a wrap – seams bursting, tone becoming more first-person by the second – it's clear Jacobs can no longer bear his own deep pessimism. Looking back, he writes (on title cards), "We expected Cinder Planet. We didn't expect The 60s. For a while, it looked like the real New Deal." Old century done, he glimpses the reincarnated "spirit of Jack Smith" in a raver-clad downtown antiwar demonstrator leading a thrift-shop percussion band. Then again, that sequence ends when his camcorder batteries run out – just before cops in riot gear stormed the peaceful protesters.

"There is plenty of reason to despair. We can't despair. Despair is collaboration with the enemy," Jacobs asserts, more youthfully optimistic at 71 than he was as someone to trust under 30. It isn't necessarily convincing, though. The very finished (at least until DVD extras arrive) Fahrenheit 9/11 looks at an immediate past and present, figuring it's never too late to change. Star Spangled to Death (which Jacobs, whatever he says now, will probably never really "complete") looks wider and deeper. It has its doubts.

'Star Spangled to Death' plays Sat/3, 2 p.m. (continuing at 6:30 p.m. after a 5 p.m. dinner break), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Screening Room, 701 Mission, S.F. $7. (415) 978-2787.