In some circles, Roger Jacoby is best known as the lover of Ondine, the Andy Warhol superstar he met on Warhol’s Factory scene. Jacoby was a painter and gallery assistant at the time, but he began dabbling in film under the tutelage of noted avant-garde filmmaker Marie Menken, who gave him his first camera.
After he and Ondine moved to Pittsburgh in 1972, however, Jacoby devoted more time to film — much of the rest of his short life, which ended in 1985, when he died at 40 of complications from AIDS. And it’s Jacoby’s significant cinematic legacy that Wood Street Galleries will honor starting Friday, Oct. 25, when it opens the exhibit “Roger Jacoby: The Pittsburgh Years” as part of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s fall Gallery Crawl.
The exhibit includes restored versions of three of his short films on a loop, as well as that camera — a 16mm Bolex — and other archival material.
Trust director of galleries and public art Anastasia James, who curated the show, said Jacoby is one of a handful of artists “who bridged the pre- and post-liberation eras of gay experimental filmmaking.”
“I find him to be this really important, poignant voice from that era,” she said.
Jacoby chose Pittsburgh because it was home to his sister, educator and University of Pittsburgh grad Susan Chainey.
Once here, he befriended Sally Dixon, the pathbreaking founder of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s film department and a champion of experimental cinema, and got a gig accompanying the museum’s silent films screening at the museum on piano. James said Dixon also introduced Jacoby to the fledgling arts nonprofit Pittsburgh Filmmakers and helped him secure the NEA grant on which he built his career. All eight of his completed films were made in Pittsburgh.
Aficionados of the avant-garde cite Jacoby for his innovative hand-processing techniques, through which he achieved unique colors and textures, even warping, scratching and overexposing filmstrips to get the look he wanted. Sometimes the end result was completely abstract — leaving behind the world as photographed — and other times it layered flowing abstractions over filmed scenes.
“A lot of people have commented on how that becomes part of the emotional resonance of the films,” James said.
The earliest of the looped films is “Dream Sphinx Opera” (1974), an eight-minute short set to a Rossini tune sung by legendary diva Maria Callas. In the first half, a nude woman poses for the camera; the second half features Ondine and Dixon in 19th-century costumes, frolicking beneath the glass ceiling of Phipps Conservatory.
“L’Amico Fried’s Glamorous Friends” (1976) is a silent 12-minute film that again features Ondine and Dixon, this time disporting themselves in the Carnegie Museum’s Hall of Architecture, in front of the Museum of Natural History’s taxidermied displays, and on the stage of the Carnegie Music Hall, along with footage of additional dancers.
Finally, there’s “How To Be A Homosexual Part I” (1980), a 38-minute documentary that opens with a conversation involving a couple from Pittsburgh’s Gay Activist Alliance, in which they discuss how they learned they were gay, gay self-hatred, and political polarization between gay and lesbian “haves and have-nots.”
Other scenes, some shot in Jacoby’s apartment on Walnut Street in Shadyside, feature his conversations with a deaf friend and a music rehearsal by an apparently classically trained male tenor and female soprano. Other sequences, silent and shot in New York, offer an intimate portrait of Jacoby’s mother, seen reclining on a couch in a quilted blue bathrobe, cigarette in hand.
Many of the scenes are depicted through Jacoby’s roving, hand-held lens, which characteristically seeks out details in close-up, and doesn’t always depict faces, even when the subject is speaking.
Many of the people Jacoby captured on film remain unidentified. James said she hopes the exhibit will help rectify that by bringing his films to a wider audience.
James said the new exhibit came together after she learned that some of Jacoby’s little-seen films were being restored and conserved by the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, with funding from The Film Foundation and the National Film Preservation Foundation.
“He is really this visionary artist who is often overlooked because he died tragically young,” James said.
“Roger Jacoby: The Pittsburgh Years” is the first in a planned series of Cultural Trust exhibitions and programs dedicated to “historic artists who have created significant work in, about, or influenced by the city of Pittsburgh, especially in the field of time-based or experimental media,” according to a news release.
Other upcoming Jacoby-themed programs includes a Nov. 9 event at the Trust’s Harris Theater. The evening, co-presented with Pittsburgh Sound + Image, includes a rare screening of four of Jacoby’s films on 16mm prints, followed by a panel discussion featuring Chainey, Jacoby’s friend and fellow filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh, and Jacoby’s one-time partner, the filmmaker and AIDS activist Jim Hubbard.
The Gallery Crawl on Friday, Oct. 25 also includes events or exhibits at about a dozen other venues, including the return of artist Tom Sarver’s Art Olympics (a game-show-style artmaking contest); a gallery talk for “Collections in Black: A Celebration of Black Comic Book Culture” at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center; and an interactive Dia de los Muertos experience at Greer Cabaret Theater.