- Tuesday, July 03, 2012
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Seeking the Monkey King
Phyllis Wattis Theater
noon
Ken Jacobs, 2011, 40 min., video
An abstract audiovisual masterpiece, Seeking the Monkey King plays mind-tricks on the viewer, who never quite knows what he or she is seeing: a piece of gold foil being crumpled, a series of hallucinatory vectors, or a postapocalyptic and chaotic landscape of fire and ice. Superimposed against this is a surging soundtrack by J. G. Thirlwell and an anticapitalistic, antipatriotic text addressed to an imagined hierarchal figure, "The Monkey King." Seeking the Monkey King was included in a recent film program in Manhattan supporting Occupy Wall Street.
Museum and program admission are free.
Image: Ken Jacobs, Seeking the Monkey King (still), 2011; courtesy Ken Jacobs
Copresented with San Francisco Cinematheque; screens courtesy of the filmmaker.
