Lewis Jacobs

Lewis Jacobs (1904 – February 11, 1997) was an American author, director and publisher. Jacobs attended art school in Philadelphia and soon moved from an interest in photography to a deep interest in cinema. Jacobs directed several experimental short films modeled after the Soviet social and political cinema and he was fond of and drew inspirations from the likes of Dziga Vertov and Hans Richter.

In 1930 he founded the magazine Experimental Cinema, which was one of the first publications to view film as art. He spent time with noted early pioneers such as Sergei Eisenstein. He lived in Hollywood gaining acclaim as a film scholar, taking jobs such as advising Orson Welles on his first feature film Citizen Kane and directing Elizabeth Taylor in her first screen tests for the film National Velvet.

After spending many years in Hollywood as a contract studio writer, he moved to New York during the period of the blacklist and joined the Workers Film and Photo League in 1931 as well as doing work for film trailers. In 1933 he compiled all the footage he had made during his lunch breaks and put it into the film Footnote to Fact, which was intended to be part one in a four-part documentary titled As I Walk, a look into the depths of poverty during the Great Depression in NYC. The final three parts were never completed and the original negative was believed lost until it was rediscovered by the Anthology Film Archives in 1990. The film is now available in the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 DVD box-set, under the volume entitled "Picturing a Metropolis".

Jacobs also authored numerous book on cinema, taught film courses at universities, juried many film festivals and wrote the screenplay for the film Sweet Love, Bitter (1967), which went on to become the inspiration for Clint Eastwood's Bird.

His later years were spent focusing on mixed-media collages for which he won numerous awards.

Bibliography

The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History With an Essay
The Emergence of Film Art
Introduction to the Art of the Movies: An Anthology of Ideas on the Nature
The Movies as Medium
The Documentary Tradition

References

Huffman, Nicole (2001). "New Frontiers in American Documentary Film". American Studies Program. University of Virginia.
Lewis Jacobs Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.

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