Seeking the Monkey King

March 25 · Regal Riviera · 2:00 P.M.

Ken Jacobs, 2011, 40 minutes

“Is it just foil, a digital animation, a crumbling Babel, or a descent into Peter Jackson/James Cameron/Jerry Goldsmith hell?” — David Phelps, Mubi’s The Notebook

Radical, ravishing, revolutionary. Though Seeking the Monkey King premiered in the cozy confines of the Walter Reade Theatre as part of the 2011 New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde” program, the film is perhaps best known for playing for free in Zuccotti Park in conjunction with the Occupy protests that were, at that time, taking place across the globe. Beneath a sublime original score by J.G. Thirlwell, Seeking combines Ken Jacobs’s (literally) patented Eternalism technique — which produces uncanny stereoptic effects without the need for glasses — with onscreen intertitles (at once poetic and didactic) to evoke the kind of political urges and impulses that America so easily turns a blind eye to.

preceded by
Another Occupation

Ken Jacobs, 2011, 16 minutes

Specifically intended to be paired with Seeking the Monkey King, Another Occupation employs Jacobs’s Eternalism technique to show a train ride along a jungle stream — crunching through time, with intertitles triggering thoughts about the war economy. “Asian military men appear with their pith-helmets, keeping the ferns, trees, monkeys, natives in line. The master of the stroboscopic depth illusion changes territory, but applies his familiar strategy: a ghostly, flicking film takes us into a deep and ominous Asian past.” (Jacobs)