“With a running time of 6 hours and 42 minutes, ‘‘Star Spangled to Death’’ is the magnum opus of the independent filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Begun in 1957 as a backyard bohemian romp starring the avant-garde legend Jack Smith — an amazing proto-drag performer who later directed his own underground classic, ‘‘Flaming Creatures’’ — the project grew over the years to incorporate huge chunks of appropriated material, including, for example, the entirety of Richard M. Nixon’s 1952 Checkers speech and what seems like most of an early 30’s documentary on what was then known as ‘‘darkest Africa.’’”
“Star Spangled to Death – Ken Jacobs began annotating a lyrical junkyard allegory with chunks of found footage in the late ‘50s; screened in various versions over the decades, Star Spangled to Death became his life’s work. Incorporating audiovisual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, featuring Al Jolson, Mickey Mouse, the young Jack Smith, and a half-dozen American presidents, this vast, ironic pageant of 20th-century American history is a unique and mind-boggling contraption, the ultimate underground movie.”
— Dave Kehr, The New York Times, 2004
“Finished—or perhaps abandoned—after nearly half a century of work, Ken Jacobs’s monumental, monstrous Star Spangled to Death receives its first ever theatrical run this week at Anthology Film Archives. The movie is a six-hour assemblage of found audio-visual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, interwoven with gloriously eccentric original footage shot mainly on the streets (and in the dumps) of late-’50s New York.”
— J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, October 14, 2003 (named Star Spangled to Death the best film of 2004)
“Initially shot in 16-millimeter between 1957 and ‘59, periodically expanded and updated over the following decades, and completed last year on video in a six-and-a-half-hour final version, Ken Jacobs’s magnum opus of political protest is made of the same basic ingredients as the rest of his oeuvre: beautifully shot scenes of cavorting friends and comrades (including Jerry Sims, a pre-Flaming Creatures Jack Smith, and some recent anti-Bush protesters) and found footage (including most of Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, campaign propaganda for Nelson Rockefeller, a fatuously racist documentary about Africa, and Al Jolson in blackface). Semi-indigestible by design, this nonetheless steadily builds in political and historical resonance.”
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
“It’s a stimulating, labyrinthine experience provided by a master of the American avant-garde and an historical artifact that is nevertheless piercingly contemporary.”
— Doug Cummings, Film Journey
— Mark Webber, 47th London Film Festival program note, October 2003
— Florence Tissot, Vertigo Magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 6
— The Brooklyn Rail, July 2004
— Adrian Martin
— Screen Slate
“Rather than use brief clips from campy old films to score easy political points — in the manner of, say, the unfortunately influential ‘‘Atomic Cafe’’ from 1982 — Mr. Jacobs brilliantly and generously allows much of the borrowed material to play out in its entirety, at which point it indicts itself without need of sarcastic voice-over commentary. One of the most horrifying passages in ‘‘Star Spangled’’ is an undated CBS documentary, with a genial Charles Collingwood as host, in which scientists subject rhesus monkeys to blatantly sadistic experiments intended to give a strict scientific definition to the notoriously elusive concept of love. Mr. Jacobs rightly realizes that any further editorializing on this grim film would be superfluous.”
— Michael Sicinski, The Academic Hack, January 2005
“Avant-garde filmmakers are hardly household names, and their work reaches only a fraction of the audiences of mainstream - or even art house - cinema. That hardly matters, for the likes of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Ken Jacobs have been and are the custodians of pure cinema. They remind us that film is an art form, that celluloid is a material as much as paint or stone, and that the possibilities for it have barely been explored.”
— Demetrios Matheou, London Film Festival coverage
“The unveiling of Ken Jacobs’ previously abandoned debut project Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs, 1957-60/2003) (USA) was one of the highlights of the Festival, now completed in its longest cut complimented by contemporary inter-titles bemoaning the current state of America under Bush, among other things. The film is an obese mass of information, “a feast” as programmer Mark Webber described it.”
— George Clark, World and Experimental Cinema, 47th London Film Festival, 2003
“For better and for worse, American ambition is boundless. And nothing speaks more conspicuously to a country’s ambition than its imperialism. During the past hundred years or so, our country has sought to paint the world in its image, and though its reach still exceeds its grasp, that gap is shrinking, and might not be around for much longer.”
— The Austin Chronicle (The 9th Cinematexas International Short Film Festival)