Roger Jacoby

Once a hot spot, the Bowery Follies Cabaret is now just another broken down New York City nightclub populated with the last vestiges of vaudeville entertainers, misfits and a headliner known as Heaven. She, like the club, has been there too long. In a drunken reverie, she wanders through the lives of the men who watch her sing night after night, looking for love ...trying to make sense of how she got there in the first place, hoping, for a ticket out.

Experimental filmmaker Roger Jacoby animates his muse, Ondine, as the villainous Scarpia in snippets from Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca." Freely mixing melodramatic gestures from his actors with a ruined soundtrack of static and full-on textural experiments that simulate decayed nitrate film bursting with color or fading to white, Jacoby finds emotional release in repeating Floria Tosca's leap to her death. A visual feast from the former painter who shows a creative command of celluloid, both figural and abstract. - Marilyn Ferdinand

L'AMICO FRIED'S GLAMOROUS FRIENDS "...is built around a pas de deux by Ondine and Sally Dixon... with a quickness of breath and dryness of the throat one is apt to say, 'What is that!' as if peering into some exotic fog. The sometimes lovely and sometimes not beautiful but nearly always exquisite collisions of light and shadow upon the screen which seduces us... And may as likely cause one to squirm in one's seat..." - Carmen Vigil, former Program Director of San Francisco Cinematheque

A few basic gestures, deliberately excluding indefinite states in between.

A hand-processed film made of excerpts from a compilation journal work.

Ondine and Sally Dixon "star" as ecstatic 19th century lovers in Jacoby's first home-processed film.

A portrait of the artist during a period of AIDS-related illness.

Roger Jacoby is a filmmaker who makes unities out of contradictions.

One of Roger Jacoby's earliest films, FUTURIST SONG represents Jacoby's transition from painting to film.

Three friends watch All About Eve.

A hand-processed film of the filmmaker's sister showing a hand-puppet to her two young children.