The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave: that is the way the USA sees itself in its national anthem, »The Star Spangled Banner«. This song has always been controversial and open to both affirmative and subversive renderings. In »Star Spangled to Death« by Ken Jacobs, a film version of the anthem forms the centre of an epic deconstruction, lasting over six hours, of both the visual, and the musical and ideological levels of this “documentary film”, by showing the text to sing along with while a montage of patriotic images is presented. Jacobs here sums up his avant-garde film production by combining strategies from »Blonde Cobra« (1959-63) and »Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son« (1969). The structural interest of his more recent films takes a back seat, giving way to express political agitation.

In Jacobs’ mythology, the fifties remain the decisive decade: at the time, he himself belonged to a New York Bohemian scene with a retreat on the Lower East Side that was still untouched by the dynamics of real estate markets (large parts of the self-filmed material in »Star Spangled to Death« were, however, still made in West 75th Street). At the same time, politics in the USA reached a decisive turning point: following the »New Deal«, the presidency of Eisenhower was very conservatively oriented. It was also at this time that the career of Richard Nixon began, who, in Jacobs’ films – as in so many films of the American left wing – became the most important figure in post-war history. By his beating New York governor Nelson Rockefeller as the candidate for the vice-presidency under Eisenhower, the reactionary establishment won against those right-wingers that wanted to retain the welfare state. Power politics finds its antagonists in the figures that were invented and acted in Jacobs’ circle in the fifties: the filmmaker Jack Smith (»Flaming Creatures«) as »The Spirit not of Life but of Living« is on the one side, Jerry the Pariah on the other. Jacobs himself performed in several roles as Oscar Friendly, a ringmaster, and a janitor.

These scenes of surreal fantasy and theatrical extravagance form the narrative framework of »Star Spangled to Death«, without their creating an actual plot. The chief part of the film consists of found – or, rather, collected – material. For Ken Jacobs’ found footage very obviously stems from particular areas of interest: there are many »featurettes«, a long report on a journey to Africa as well as science programmes about the maternal instinct in monkeys, a promotion film for Nelson Rockefeller as well as a famous early speech by Richard Nixon from his lounge room, in addition to many »Dance Follies« and excerpts from Hollywood films, of which often only the soundtrack is used. Jacobs uses whole works by the Afro-American Oscar Micheaux in »Star Spangled to Death«, and ethnic issues of representation play an important – and problematic – role anyway in the film. Jerry the Pariah is identified as Jewish on several occasions, something that Jacobs however relativizes towards the end. »Keeping with cosmic logic«, he cannot put Jerry on a par with »Christiandom’s deathcamp victims«. This is only one example of the precarious syntheses drawn by Jacobs.

The historical argumentation in »Star Spangled to Death« is often carried forward by inserts in which, for example, he endorses a certain interpretation of the Palestine conflict that puts the main blame on American policies: »Israel is a crime perpetrated by Christians towards Jews and Arabs«. The book he frequently refers to is called »The Dark Side of Christian History«. The film is always about a counter-history of the American nation that sees its opposition as the Christian, conservative type of politician typified by Nixon. In comparison with the heyday of the New York avant-garde, the strategies have thus undergone a clear shift. Whereas back then the focus was on a form of sexual politics that attracted attention through transgression and provocation, without caring too much about moral majorities, Jacobs has undertaken a philosophy of history that is concerned with the right interpretation of Jewish-Christian Messianism. In doing so, he often comes close a left-wing paranoia that, as he himself concedes, is sometimes »untethered by common sense«. This is however broken up by a sub-history about the slave issue and colonial exploitation. According to Jacobs’ film, Mickey Mouse’s genealogy derives from the minstrel shows, about whose history Jacobs has very interesting material. The reconstruction of a history of the representation of »blackness« inside and outside of canonical American cinema makes »Star Spangled Banner« a sort of archive that falsely sees itself as a manifesto. The presentation of each complex of material is, on the one hand, too explicit (because of the inserts) and, on the other, too vague. The space of analogies outlined by Jacobs is so strongly bent that at the one end there can be a film spectacular like Cecil B. DeMille’s »The Crusades«, and at the either a simple remark on a world religion: » Islam is an elaborate excuse for beheading the clitoris.« However aphoristically this statement may be meant, it is nonetheless conforms with the thetic regime according to which the whole film functions. The fragments communicate with another only through the knowing subject Jacobs, who is, however, so taken up by his rage about the course history has taken that he declaims rather than argues.

»Star Spangled to Death« has an epilogue, a half-hour-long third chapter bearing the title »The Height of Folly«, that presents its own deconstructions once more »in limbo«, that is, in a stage of self-dissolution. But this seems rather like an attempt to make a monologic structure polyphonic once more. The presence of American troops in Iraq and the presidency of George W. Bush (»a moron«) become the perfect example of the way American history has gone wrong. The USA has become a »patsy nation«, democracy peters out in a dissonance: »the sound of blind faith taking blind greed on a ride«. This dissonant soundtrack not lies over the Star Spangled Banner not only acoustically, but also visually – but at the end it is outvoted by the agitator Jacobs, because he always has the last word.

The European premiere of »Star Spangled Banner« took place on 25 January 2004 in the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. From 22 to 25 January the MUMOK in Vienna put on a series of events with works by Ken Jacobs as part of the exhibition »Xscreen«

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

---