The great avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who died in October, described Star Spangled to Death, his long-gestating magnum opus (which was once titled American Failure), as “a Frankenstein movie.” And indeed, this seven-hour-twenty-minute epic, started by Jacobs in the oppressively conformist Eisenhower era, and completed during the Bush-era post-9/11 years, with an anti-Trump prologue added in 2020 is, like Frankenstein’s monster, a living, breathing colossus made from discarded scraps and pieces. Incorporating travelogues, cartoons, campaign films, Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, and all manner of cinematic detritus, Jacobs allows these artifacts to speak for themselves, revealing American racism, materialism, and narrow-mindedness. Intercut with this trove of found footage are anarchic, free-spirited scenes of street performance filmed by Jacobs, starring the legendary underground performer Jack Smith as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and Jerry Sims as Suffering. Jacobs called it “a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict.” As Jonas Mekas wrote in the Brooklyn Rail of this exhilarating and horrifying masterpiece, “so Ken takes a knife and cuts it all open. Irreverently and lovingly and with the skill of a good surgeon he reveals it all to us from the inside, and we do not know whether to laugh, cry, run out screaming, or applaud.” Although the film will feel like an extremely timely and relevant act of resistance in today’s America, it is also a vivid time capsule of downtown New York during the height of the underground scene.

—David Schwartz, independent curator and writer, and President of the Board of Directors of The Film-Maker’s Cooperative.

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