Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 1

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM: 1
44th Regus London Film Festival
Friday 3 November 2000, at 7:30pm

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUDIENCE
In order to appreciate the added depth of the Pulfrich 3D effect, the viewer should use the “Eye Opener” filter during both of the works presented in this programme. Please return the filter to cinema staff after the performance.

OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1990, Pulfrich 3D 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min
Shafting the screen: the projector beam maintains its angle as it meets the screen and keeps on going, introducing volume as well as light, just as in Paris, Cairo and Venice of a century ago happen to pass. Passing through the tunnel mid-film, a red flash will signal you to switch your single Pulfrich filter before your right eye to before your left (keep both eyes open). Centre seating is best: depth deepens viewing further from the screen. Handle filter by edges to preserve clarity. Either side of filter may face screen. Filter can be held at any angle, there’s no “up” or “down” side. Also, two filters before an eye does not work better than one, and a filter in front of each only negates the effects. (Ken Jacobs)

BITEMPORAL VISION: THE SEA
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1994, Pulfrich 3D Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.70 min
Nervous System riff on 587 frames photographed by filmmaker Phil Solomon. This work was inspired, during a visit to Hamburg, by the photography of Daniel Maier-Reimer. The surface of water becomes a hugely 3D cosmic cataclysm; what’s up, what’s down, forward or back or solid or open becomes entirely unstable. The mind is soon at sea, Rorschaching like crazy in the effort to maintain equilibrium. (Ken Jacobs)

Suggestions for use of the neutral density (Pulfrich) filter for Bitemporal Vision: The Sea :-

Only one filter to each viewer. Filter is held before one eye, both eyes remaining open. Viewer decides when to view the film through the filter, and which eye to place it in front of. Middle viewing positions are best (as with all stereo).

It takes time to appreciate the changes, and to familiarise with the process. Sail through any initial discomforts; the brain is a muscle that can be sluggish and grumpy when asked to learn new tricks.

The image is strongly 3D even without the filter but the filter will strongly enhance the depth. It can also radically change arrangement in depth. Choice of eye determines which parts of the scene are in front of or in back of other parts, and in which direction movement flows. The more abstract and non-representational the scene – releasing the mind from its knowledge of physical law and its expectations re. behaviour of objects in space – the more it is that changes can be seen; that is, acknowledged by the mind. So I suggest using the filter most intensively when this depiction of water is least recognisable as water. (Two straightforward camera takes are the basis of Bitemporal Vision: The Sea, but departure from the familiar will be unmistakable.) Try it, for instance, when the overall scene becomes lighter in tone following the first advancing wave. (A wave rumbling forward slightly below eye level…that will transform to a massive cloud form moving overhead …)

It may take a minute to adapt to the filter before seeing its effect. Hang in with it and more visual events will become apparent, all the drama and struggle and comings and goings of the details. Placing the filter left or right, to match the direction to which a form is moving, will advance that form towards the viewer. The filter can also convert a solid form into an open space, and (switch filter) vice-versa.

(Ken Jacobs)

FURTHER NOTES

THE PULFRICH EFFECT

The Pulfrich Effect. A dark grey filter is held before one eye, both eyes remaining open. The effect of the filter is a delay in the time it takes for the light that does pass through it to be signalled to the brain. One eye will now be seeing the image presently lighting up the screen while the other will be seeing the film frame flashed a moment ago. It becomes possible to offer the mind, simultaneously, two distinct but related views of a scene. Complete stereopsis becomes possible, convincing 3D, true-to-life or anything but according to how the two information bundles relate.

Each viewer of Bitemporal Vision: The Sea is offered a wand with truly magical properties. A filter on one end, it can be handled like a lorgnette. At the viewer’s discretion it can be placed when wanted either in front of the left or right eye, either enhancing the depth character of the scene or – especially in the more abstract passages – entirely transforming depth character. Shapes suddenly appear or disappear, or radically reshape. Figure and ground trade places; direction of movement changes.

But the viewer, of course, is not being asked to simply make note of the changes: They’re to be experienced, through intense and prolonged and empathetic observation.

The Nervous System consists, very basically, of two near identical prints on two stills capable of single frame advance and “freeze” (turning the movie back into a series of stills), frame … by … frame, in various degrees of synchronisation. Most often there’s only a single frame difference. Difference makes for movement and uncanny three dimensional space illusions via a shutting mask or spinning propeller up front, between the projectors, alternating the cast images. Tiny shifts in the way the two images overlap create radically different effects. The throbbing flickering is necessary to create “eternalisms”: unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed).

I’ve said, “Advanced filmmaking leads to Muybridge”. That’s certainly true for me. Closing in on (to allow the expansion of) ever smaller pieces of time is my personal ever promising and inviting Black Hole. Actors’ faces can stun me with boredom. (Movies are about actors.) I confess I feel walled in by human faces altogether, not as misanthropic reaction but because the human colonisation of human experience, in our urban lives, is so thorough. It is astonishing to find oneself here with so many others to chat with, but isn’t this essentially a search party … with our work cut out for us? We’ve gotten caught in the makings of our own minds and the only way out seems to be to enter into the workings of the mind. Film – as itself the subject of inquiry – is the spell we enter so as to pull apart the fibres of this phantasm, our opportunity to lay out the mind in strips. So, if picking at the texture of cinema, at the end of its filmic phase, seems about as inward as one can get, it’s because the name of this digging tool I’ve devised, The Nervous System, also designates a main territory of its search, that place where we’ve blithely applied mechanism to mind, willy nilly producing that development of mind known as cinema. After all, the micro and macro worlds are equally “out there”. Fresh air rushes in from the core of things, too.

(Ken Jacobs)

Mark Webber

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 1

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