Jerry Jofen (1925–1993) was an American painter, collagist, and experimental filmmaker.
Life and career
Zalman "Jerry" Jofen was born in Bialystok, Poland, to a scholarly rabbinical family. In 1941 he fled with his family to the United States to escape the
Nazis
Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Na ...
, arriving in San Francisco on the last refugee ship from Japan. Later he moved to New York City, where he spent much of his time in Greenwich Village. Starting out as a painter, he began to explore film and other media in the 1960s. Jofen is best known for his part in the New York underground film scene, where he collaborated with artists such as Jack Smith,
Ken Jacobs
Ken Jacobs (born May 25, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York) is an American experimental filmmaker. His style often involves the use of found footage which he edits and manipulates. He has also directed films using his own footage.
Ken Jacobs directed ...
, and
Angus MacLise
Angus William MacLise (March 14, 1938 – June 21, 1979) was an American percussionist, composer, poet, occultist and calligrapher, known as the first drummer for the Velvet Underground who abruptly quit due to disagreements with the band pla ...
. Few of his films survive, mainly because he had a habit of destroying them or leaving them unfinished. Nevertheless he was a noted experimental filmmaker in his day, making innovative use of superimposition and other techniques, and influencing other artists such as Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Ron Rice, and
Barbara Rubin
Barbara Rubin (1945–1980) was an American filmmaker and performance artist. She is best known for her landmark 1963 underground film ''Christmas on Earth''.
Life and career
Barbara Rubin grew up in the Cambria Heights neighborhood of Queens, ...
.
In 1965 Jofen's work was included in the New Cinema Festival (also known as the Expanded Cinema Festival), an extensive series of multimedia productions in New York presented by Jonas Mekas and featuring the work of such artists as
Robert Rauschenberg
Milton Ernest "Robert" Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the Pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his Combines (1954–1964), a group of artwor ...
and Claes Oldenburg. Mekas was impressed with Jofen, writing in the '' Village Voice'', "The first three programs of the New Cinema Festival – the work of Angus McLiseicNam June Paik, and Jerry Joffen ic– dissolved the edges of this art called cinema into a frontiersland mystery." Jofen's entry also made a lasting impression on the playwright
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman (born June 10, 1937 in New York City) is an American avant-garde playwright and the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater.
Achievements and awards
Foreman has written, directed and designed over fifty of his own plays, b ...
, who recalled it years later as one of his favorites.
Jofen's films include, among others:
* ''Voyage'' (ca. 1962), with Ron Rice, Joel Markman, et al. and music by Angus MacLise.
* ''How Can You Tell the Dancer from the Dance'' (c. 1968), a "psychedelic portrait of a night in the city."
* ''We're Getting On'' (c. 1973) with Jack Smith
* ''Rituals and Demonstrations'' (1977), a documentary about Jewish religious rituals in 1970s Brooklyn.
He also appears in Jonas Mekas's ''Film Magazine of the Arts'' (1963) and ''Birth of a Nation'' (1997).
Jofen's technique has been described as "collage-like," and in fact he has also been recognized as a gifted collagist, his work often compared to that of Kurt Schwitters. See also James Kalm's article a artcritical.com "Though giving a tip of the hat to Kurt Schwitters, this work elicits authentic Pop rather than the affected version currently in mode." An : "...the late Jerry Jofen's superbly wrought neo-Schwittersian stapled-paper pieces, all rhythm and cartoonish wit tempered with a subtle mordancy and a perfect sense of color and composition." Rarely shown during his lifetime, Jofen's collages began attracting more attention after a 1997 showing curated by Klaus Kertess, who wrote, "Jerry Jofen was a migrant in search of light. Collage formed his art and his life. Makeshift procedures and the dispersal of the found and discarded in restless search for coherence, so often endemic to collage, parallel the make-do strategies, vagaries and serendipity of immigrant life."
Jofen's films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and, more recently, the
Anthology Film Archives
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema.
See also
*
New American Cinema
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, parti ...