This screening of Star Spangled to Death is an epilogue to the retrospective Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs at Open City Documentary Festival 2026. Celebrating the work and lives of Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025, the programme coincides with the publication of I Walked Into My Shortcomings, an anthology of Jacobs’ writings edited by William Rose for The Visible Press.

Star Spangled to Death
Ken Jacobs | 1956-61/2004 | USA | 440’ | digital | English spoken

Almost 7 hours long, Star Spangled to Death is Ken Jacobs’ magnus opus, his great New York film which would have to wait from 1959 until 2004 for completion as affordable digital video. Starring Jack Smith as The Spirit Not of Life but of Living and Jerry Sims as Suffering, this social critique of the USA, “stolen and dangerously sold-out” in Jacobs’ own words, feels as poignant and relevant today as in the 1950s when it was originally shot.

“Star Spangled To Death is an epic film costing hundreds of dollars! It combines many found films with my own alternately off-the-cuff and intensely staged filming (I once said directing Jack and Jerry was like directing the wind). It’s a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. Race and religion and monopolisation of wealth and the purposeful dumbing down of citizens and addiction to war become props for clowning. In whimsy we trusted. A handful of artists, costumed and performing unconvincingly, appeal to viewer imagination and understanding to complete the picture. Jack Smith’s pre-Flaming Creatures performance is a cine-visitation of the divine (the movie has raggedly cosmic pretensions). His character, The Spirit Not of Life but of Living, celebrates Suffering, personified by poor, rattled, fierce Jerry Sims, as an inextricable essence of living.” (Jacobs)

There will be 10-minute breaks between Parts 1 and 2, and between Parts 3 and 4, and a 30-minute break half-way through the screening, between Parts 2 and 3.

One of the American avant-garde’s most prolific figures, Ken Jacobs (1933-2025) enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking in the late 1990s. From the monumental Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son to his Nervous Magic Lantern performances and more recent digital and 3D explorations, Jacobs was an artist whose work is an uncompromised declaration of love for cinema. An activist and a teacher as well as a filmmaker, Jacobs was an integral part of the New York alternative film scene since the 1950s. In 1966, together with his wife Flo, he established the legendary Millennium Film Workshop. Jacobs was also the co-founder – with Larry Gottheim – of one of the USA’s first cinema departments at SUNY Binghamton, where he taught for several decades, influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers and artists such as Phil Solomon, Mark LaPore, J. Hoberman, Art Spiegelman and Lee Ranaldo.