Date: 27 October 2007 | Season: London Film Festival 2007 | Tags: London Film Festival
CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR
Saturday 27 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio
Ken Jacobs, Capitalism: Child Labor, USA, 2006, 14 min (continuous loop)
Ken Jacobs continues his interrogation of archival sources by deconstructing a single stereoscopic photograph from the Victorian era. The image of barefoot children in a textile mill is spun into a critique of capitalism and the workforce of child labour which sustained the industrial revolution. With a dizzying array of visual techniques, space is condensed, expanded, flipped and cropped, accompanied by Rick Reed’s compelling soundtrack.
Ken Jacobs lives and works in New York City. Widely regarded as one of the key figures of independent and avant-garde cinema through films such as Little Stabs at Happiness (1958-60), Blonde Cobra (1959-63) and Tom Tom the Pipers Son (1969-71), Jacobs has also devoted much of his creative life to developing new techniques of live performance using film and projected light. More recently, and now in his seventies, he has become one of the most innovative and consistently productive artists working in digital video. Ken Jacobs has been featured in retrospectives, exhibitions and screenings at most major museums, biennials, film festivals and cinematheques.
PROGRAMME NOTES
CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR
Saturday 27 October 2007, from 12-7pm
London BFI Southbank Studio
CAPITALISM: CHILD LABOR
Ken Jacobs, USA, 2006, video, colour, sound, 14 min
A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.’ (Ken Jacobs)
Capitalism: Child Labor is another masterful manipulation of old imagery. Ken Jacobs reworks a pair of stereoscopic photographs of barefoot children in a textile factory. The sepia-tone shots were originally taken with side-by-side cameras separated by the short distance between our two eyes. When placed in stereoscopic viewer, with the right eye seeing the right-hand image and the left eye seeing the left-hand image, you get a three-dimensional effect of depth. Jacobs begins his 14-minute video with tiny, twitchy pans across the two stereoscope photos. The highly repetitive imagery matches the highly repetitive tasks of the child workers frozen in time. Then Jacobs deconstructs the scene into overlapping insets and close-ups. Jacobs extracts a Cubist kaleidoscope from a vintage image. As for the critique of capitalism implied in his title, that’s for the viewer to extract. (Bill Stamets, Chicago Sun Times)
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