ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Footnote to Fact directed by Lewis Jacobs. Considered lost until the 1990s when Anthology Film Archives rediscovered the original negative, Footnote to Fact was made by film critic, film historian, and filmmaker Lewis Jacobs, who had studied painting and design. The film consists of documentary shots of New York street life during the Great Depression that are intercut with images of a young woman, rocking back and forth in her apartment. Jacobs contrasts a demonstration with a military parade and, in an associative montage, war scenes are combined with homeless men lying in the streets, possibly veterans of the Great War. As the films comes to a climax, shots follow each other in an accelerating tempo as the woman, with her eyes wide open, turns on the gas feed in her apartment and commits suicide.
