Jim Jennings (1951-2021) (Patreon)

One of the true unsung heroes of American experimental cinema, Jim Jennings has passed away, following a five-year mental and physical degeneration resulting from Alzheimer's. I will be writing a fairly extensive career summarizing obituary for the next issue of Cinema Scope, but for now I wanted to direct you to this website -- https://jimjenningsfilm.com/ -- where you can discover, or revisit, most of his extant film and video work.

Jim was a contemporary of filmmakers like Nathaniel Dorsky and Phil Solomon, and about a decade younger than Ken Jacobs and Ernie Gehr. Much like another of his contemporaries, the now-retired Expressionist filmmaker Fred Worden, Jim was a well-kept secret. Although he was universally regarded as a master by his peers, and supported throughout his career by prominent programmers such as Steve Anker and Andréa Picard, Jennings was bit of an introvert, and in no way given to self-promotion. In fact, throughout nearly his entire working career, Jim maintained his "day job" as a master plumber in New York City, owning and managing his own firm. According to his wife Karen Trainor, Jennings often brought his Bolex along with him so he could shoot street footage while he was caught in traffic between jobs.

Much of his work was silent, but he did make a few highly sophisticated sound films, including one late digital work, 2012's Watch the Closing Doors. I find that Jim's work often has a spirit similar to Dorsky's, in that he was deeply attentive to casual structures and occurrences in the world that led to unexpected light-events. But most of Jim's films were hand-held, and his editing seemed much more improvisational. Put another way, where Dorsky's films bear a relation to stately 19th century classical music, Jennings was a bit of a jazz-man.

A slogan that Jennings captured in his 1998 film Silvercup has always struck me as an inadvertent statement of purpose for the man's filmmaking: Perfection is Not an Accident.