“One of 2011’s best films…an exhilarating audiovisual workout that simultaneously engages multiple parts of the brain.”—J. Hoberman, Village Voice

National treasure Ken Jacobs, now in his 70s, might be the most radical U.S. filmmaker working today. Seeking the Monkey King, his most acclaimed and bracing film in recent years, offers a visionary lamentation about the state of America today. The film unleashes tremendous energy as a clamorous collage soundtrack (by the equally adventurous musician J. G. Thirlwell) plays overtop of a roiling abstract landscape, punctuated by Jacobs’s topical, outraged intertitles ranting about American greed and corruption. It’s easy to see how the film has become of the defining artworks of the Occupy Wall Street zeitgeist. (40 mins., video)

Starting off the evening is Jacobs’s classic Perfect Film, an unedited film—“perfect” as is—that Jacobs found in a Canal Street bin of discarded New York news footage of man-on-the-street interviews on the day Malcolm X was assassinated. (22 mins., 16mm)