Ken Jacobs Retrospective Tour

KEN JACOBS RETROSPECTIVE
UK Touring Programme
13 October – 14 December 2000

To accompany the first ever British performances of the amazing Nervous System projections, a three programme retrospective of work by Ken Jacobs, a leading innovator of avant-garde film for the past 40 years.

After making his first films in the late 1950s, Jacobs was at the forefront of the experimental film movement which exploded in New York and across the world throughout the next decade, liberating cinema from its previous restrictions and conventions. The earliest film presented here, The Whirled (1956-61)”, features Jack Smith in a series of vignettes from the period which also yielded the better known and highly influential Little Stabs At Happiness (1958-60) and Blonde Cobra (1959-63), two films considered revolutionary for the way they displayed an entire new cinematic sensibility. Blonde Cobra was particularly radical, containing long scenes of black leader and a soundtrack that incorporates live radio, making no two projections the same.

“Window” (1964) and “Airshaft” (1967) were also unique, showing Jacobs refining his talent for investigating space, an approach rooted in his schooling by abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman. With these films Jacobs anticipated the Structural movement, which subsequently became the dominant style of the avant-garde throughout the 1970s, being particularly prevalent among the new English filmmakers.

In 1969, Jacobs made Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son, a 2 hour tour-de-force constructed by re-photographing and dissecting a 10 minute short made by Billy Bitzer in 1905. After presenting the original film, Jacobs pursues a deep analysis into its visual elements; slowing down, freezing action and examining small, abstracted areas of the frame. The film becomes a treatise on composition, an art lesson unfolding before our eyes. Free of narrative, the action becomes the drama. That same year, the filmmaker began to investigate the effects of the Pulfrich pendulum method, in which moving images are given a strong 3D depth. Seen through a Pulfrich filter, the tracking shot of a snowbound suburban housing estate in Globe (1969) becomes an immense vista of shifting planes, tectonic vision of the highest order. The later film Opening The Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1990) re-presents Lumiere footage to similar effect.

The innovation of these works, and experiences directing live action shadow plays, led to the Nervous System, a live projection technique using two specially adapted projectors. Since 1975, Jacobs has developed numerous works that use two identical filmstrips to produce unimagined illusions of depth and perception. Expanding on Muybridge, Marey and the theories of early film, Jacobs unlocks the unknown possibilities hidden deep within cinema, the depth of composition that is usually lost in the unretarded flurry of frames. The Nervous System will receive their British premiere in November at the London Film Festival and selected venues across England.

During his time realising this complex projection set-up, Jacobs continued to investigate other ways of recycling images, calling for “a Museum of Found Footage … a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment”. His Urban Peasants (1975) marries pre-war home movie footage shot by his wife’s Aunt Stella with a recording of “How To Speak Yiddish”. Perfect Film (1986) presents rushes from TV news footage following the assassination of Malcolm X. The film’s structure fits perfectly alongside his other work, though surprisingly the filmmaker claims to have found the reel in a rubbish bin and considered it “perfect” in its untouched state. In 1978, Jacobs and his students sequentially re-edited The Doctor’s Dream, a bland 1950s television drama to expose an unexpected subtext lurking between gaps in the narrative. His latest films Disorient Express and Georgetown Loop use wide-screen 35mm (by mirror printing standard 16mm) to create abstracted Rorschach images of archival train journeys.

Mark Webber

Film retrospective programmes screening at Leeds International Film Festival (13 & 14 October 2000), Brighton Cinematheque (2 November 2000), Glasgow Film Theatre (7 & 9 October 2000), Hull Screen (30 November & 14 December 2000), Manchester Cornerhouse (4 & 11 December 2000), London Lux Centre (6 & 7 December 2000), Sheffield Showroom (12 December 2000).

Live performances at London Film Festival (3 & 4 November 2000), London Lux Centre (5 November 2000), Oxford Phoenix Picture House (7 November 2000), Manchester Cornerhouse (9 November 2000), Nottingham Broadway (10 November 2000).

Ken Jacobs’ Film Retrospective is a BFI Touring Programme funded by the Arts Council of England and supported by the 44th Regus London Film Festival and Lux Distribution. The season was curated by Mark Webber.

Thank you Sandra Hebron, Tricia Tuttle, Helen De Witt, Emma Heddich, Catharine Des Forges, Joanna Denham, Ben Cook, Ken and Florence Jacobs.

Ken Jacobs Retrospective Introduction

THE FILMS OF KEN JACOBS
Touring Film Retrospecive Introductory Essay

Ken Jacobs has been a leading innovator of avant-garde film for the past 40 years. After making his first films in the mid-1950s, Jacobs soon found himself at the forefront of the experimental film movement, which exploded in New York and across the world throughout the next decade, liberating cinema from its previous conventions. His films were developed out of despair and desperation, as an attempt to make an urban guerrilla cinema in reaction to his disappointment with the “wall to wall colour stupidity” of 1950s America. “I was interested in immediacy, a sense of ease, and an art where suffering was acknowledged but not trivialised with dramatics”.

Jacobs grew up in Brooklyn, and later spent time working in the Coast Guard in Alaska. On his return to New York, he shot Orchard Street (1956), a documentary about the Lower East Side. He studied painting under Hans Hofmann, then embarked on a series of films with Jack Smith as his leading actor, working together on a 3 hour epic titled Star Spangled To Death (1957-60). This film, which is concerned with the aesthetic of failure and collapse of order, incorporates new material with found footage.

Using the pseudonym K.M. Rosenthal (“to protect my obscurity”), he completed the influential Little Stabs At Happiness (1958-60), a series of whimsical 100-foot rolls presented as they came out of the camera. In summer 1961, Jacobs and Smith spent time in Provincetown performing The Human Wreckage Review, which preceded many of the artists’ happenings of later that decade and was prematurely closed down by the police.

“Overwhelmed, hopeless, it was a good time for irreverence. And, for an art film in the vernacular, like an amusing letter, me to you. Sketchy, airy, anti-precious, without a lot of geniusing at the audience. Not anti-art, which the critics of the period, assumed. To my bafflement.”

The Whirled (1956-61), the earliest film presented in this retrospective, features Smith in series of vignettes from the period which also yielded Little Stabs At Happiness and Blonde Cobra (1959-63), two films considered revolutionary for the way they display an entire new cinematic sensibility. Blonde Cobra was particularly radical, containing long scenes of black leader and a soundtrack that incorporates live radio, making no two projections the same. Amused with the ‘Baudelairean Cinema’ label that was bestowed upon these films by Jonas Mekas, Jacobs embarked upon a loose trilogy of longer works – Baud’lairian Capers (1963-64), The Winter Footage (1964) and The Sky Socialist (1964-65), filming with friends and new wife Florence. Three shorter films shot in their loft, Window (1964), Airshaft (1967) and Soft Rain (1968) showed Jacobs’ accomplished talent for investigating space, a refined approach rooted in his schooling by abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann. With these unique and precisely composed films, he anticipated the Structural movement, which subsequently became the dominant style of the avant-garde throughout the 1970s, being particularly prevalent among the new English filmmakers.

“The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with handheld camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on screen, its horizontal-vertical axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity.” (from notes on Window)

Nissan Ariana Window (1969) is a more personal work, in which Jacobs turned his camera on home life to document his impressions on Flo’s pregnancy, their new daughter, and a new litter of kittens born to the family cat.

Jacobs most celebrated film is Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969-71), a 2 hour tour-de-force constructed by re-photographing and dissecting a 10 minute short made by Billy Bitzer in 1905. After presenting the complete original, Jacobs pursues a deep analysis into its visual elements: slowing down, freezing action and examining small, abstracted areas of the frame.

“I wanted to ‘bring to the surface’ that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape … to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still … stirred to life by a successive 16-24fps pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion.”

In the same year, Jacobs began to investigate the Pulfrich pendulum effect, by which moving images are given a strong 3D depth. Seen through an ‘Eye Opener’ filter, a normally projected tracking shot of a snowbound suburban housing estate in Globe (previously titled Excerpt From The Russian Revolution, 1969) becomes an immense vista of shifting planes. (“The found sound is X-ratable but necessary to the film’s perfect balance (Globe is symmetrical) of divine and profane.”) The later film Opening The Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1990) re-presents vintage Lumiere footage with a similar strong visual effect.

The innovations of these works, together with experiences directing live action shadow plays, led to the Nervous System, a live projection technique integrating 2 analytic projectors to derive 3D and a variety of other optical effects from standard 2D footage. Each projector contains identical strips of film, usually shown 1 or 2 frames out of sync with each other. Since 1975, Jacobs has developed numerous works that often use ancient archival footage to produce uncanny illusions of depth and movement. On screen, an image can be given the appearance of constant movement without ever seeming to go anywhere. Expanding on Muybridge and Marey, Jacobs unlocks unknown possibilities hidden deep within cinema, usually lost in the unretarded flurry of frames.

In parallel to the development of the Nervous System, Jacobs continued to investigate other ways of recycling images, calling for “a Museum of Found Footage, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment”. His Urban Peasants (1975) marries pre-war and war time home movie footage shot by his wife’s Aunt Stella with a recording of How To Speak Yiddish. In 1978, Jacobs and his students sequentially re-edited The Doctor’s Dream, a bland 1950s television drama, to expose an unexpected sexual subtext lurking between gaps in the narrative. Perfect Film (1986) presents rushes from TV news footage following the assassination of Malcolm X. The film’s structure sits comfortably alongside his other work, though surprisingly the filmmaker claims to have found the reel in a rubbish bin and considered it ‘perfect’ in its untouched state.

“I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing’, the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight through the cine-jungle; we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all.”

Jacobs’ version of [Buster] Keaton’s Cops, (1991) is offered via a radical intervention of the original frame. His latest films Disorient Express and Georgetown Loop (both 1996) use wide-screen 35mm (by mirror printing standard 16mm) to create abstracted Rorschach images of archival train journeys.

(Mark Webber, 2000)

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Ken Jacobs Retrospective: 1

KEN JACOBS RETROSPECTIVE: PROGRAMME 1
Leeds International Film Festival
Friday 13 October 2000, at 6:30pm

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUDIENCE
In order to experience the added depth of the Pulfrich 3D effect, the viewer should use the “Eye Opener” filter during GLOBE. “Flat image blossoms into 3D only when viewer places EYE OPENER © 1987 before right eye. (Keeping both eyes open, of course. As with all stereo experiences, centre seats are bet. Space will deepen as one views further from the screen.)”
PLEASE RETURN YOUR FILTER TO CINEMA STAFF AFTER THE SCREENING

WINDOW
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1964, 16mm, 18fps, colour, silent, 12 min

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience,s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera, the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film is as it came out of the camera, excepting one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice.

(Ken Jacobs, statement in New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalog #5, 1971)

“The careful relationships of planes, textures, and lighting would not lead one to expect such a spontaneous method were it not for the marvellously fluid, active “choreography for camera”. Jacobs continually manipulates focal distance, lighting, and lenses to endow one static space with hundreds of new aspects and directions and speeds of motion.

“Major contrasts, imperceptible in the flow of a continuous viewing, can be seen on closer scrutiny of the film on an analytic projector: contrasts between flat, screen-surface planes and a deeper, textured, more recognisable geography; between geometrically shaped areas of solid black and white and grainier, coloured, reflecting or textured surfaces; between objects which occupy space, such as a water-beaded horizontal sheet of tar paper, a man and woman, a hanging globe, and a statuette and again more abstract, graphic spaces from which shapes often seem cut out; between spaces on a firm, horizontal / vertical axis and those which rotate in and around that axis; and finally between movement and frozen stillness.

“Devices and materials which create the smooth, invisible transitions from shot to shot and space to space are fades done in the camera, changes in focus, backlighting modulating to frontal lighting, a window shutter which opens a slit of light in the shadow before it, and camera movement continuing over the cut. Nearer the end, superimpositions juxtapose in the space of one shot two spaces and times which overlap and define the distance between them. The film presents a few moments of visual beauty in the shifting network of a multitude of frames. Transforming the inert into the moving, Jacobs’ camera travels from form to form with delicacy and grace.”

(Lindley Page Hanlon, excerpt of essay published in “A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema”, American Federation of Arts, 1976)

AIRSHAFT
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1967, 16mm, 18fps, silent, colour, 4 min

In memory of Judy Midler.

Single fixed-camera take looking out through fire-escape door into space between rears of downtown N.Y. loft buildings. A potted plant, fallen sheet of white paper, and a cat rest on the door-ledge. Cinematographer fingers intercept, deflect, and toy with the flow of light, the stuff of images, on their way to the lens. The flow in time of the image is interrupted, partially and then wholly dissolving into blackness; the picture re-emerges, the objects smear, somewhat double, edges break up. Focus shifts between foreground and background planes, an emphasis of the shaft-space in between. The fragile image shines forth one last time before dying out. Booed at open screening marathon of Vietnam War protest films, “For Life, Against the War.”

(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

SOFT RAIN
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1968, 16mm, 18fps, colour, silent, 12 min

View from above is of a partially snow-covered low flat rooftop receding between the brick walls of two much taller downtown N.Y. loft buildings. A slightly tilted rectangular shape left of the centre of the composition is the section of rain-wet Reade Street, visible to us over the low rooftop. Distant trucks, cars, persons carrying packages, umbrellas sluggishly pass across this little stage-like area. A fine rain-mist is confused, visually, with the colour emulsion grain.

A large black rectangle following up and filling to space above the stage area is seen as both an unlikely abyss extending in deep space behind the stage or more properly, as a two dimensional plane suspended far forward of the entire snow/rain scene. Though it clearly if slightly overlaps the two receding loft building walls the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. (At one point the black plane even trembles.) So this mental tugging takes place throughout. The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is amusingly and mysteriously explicit.

Filmed at 24fps but projected at 16fps the street activity is perceptively slowed down. It’s become a somewhat heavy labouring. The loop repetition (the series hopefully will intrigue you to further run throughs) automatically imparts a steadily growing rhythmic sense of the street activities. Anticipation for familiar movement-complexes builds, and as all smaller complexities join up in our knowledge of the whole the purely accidental counter-passings of people and vehicles becomes satisfyingly cogent, seems rhythmically structured and of a piece. Becomes choreography.

(Ken Jacobs, statement in Film-makers’ Cooperative Catalogue #5, 1971)

URBAN PEASANTS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1975, 16mm, 18fps, b/w, sound on cassette, 50 min

My wife Flo’s family as recorded by her Aunt Stella Weiss. The title is no put down. Brooklyn was a place made up of many little villages; an East European shtetl is pictured here, all in the space of a storefront. Aunt Stella’s camera rolls are joined intact (not in chronological order). The silent footage is shown between two lessons in “Instant Yiddish”: “When You Go To A Hotel” and “When You Are In Trouble”.

(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

“Even before the first image of Urban Peasants appears we have had a six minute lesson in Diaspora history called “Situation Three: Getting A Hotel”. (The assumption is mind-blowing: Where in the world, with the possible exception of Birobidzhan, would one ever need to call room service in Yiddish ?) A second excerpt, “Situation Eight: When You Are in Trouble”, provides the film’s double edged punch line: “I am an American … Everything is all right.” Jacobs’s deceptively simple juxtaposition makes it impossible to watch the homely clowning of his wife’s wartime, half-Americanised family without picturing the “situation” of their European counterparts.”

(Jim Hoberman, excerpt from “Jacob’s Ladder”, Village Voice, 1989)

GLOBE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1969, 16mm, colour, sound on cassette, 22 min

Formerly titled Excerpt from the Russian Revolution

First film, to our knowledge, designed to appear in deep 3D via the Pulfrich Effect, a single dark plastic filter interfering with and absorbing most of the light going to the eye it’s held in front of (both eyes remaining open). For this film, because all foreground motion is to the right, and because we want depth to appear as it would in life, the filter (perhaps conveniently taped to an eyebrow) is to be held before the right eye. Film was shot with a standard movie-camera and is to be projected with no special devices or requirements. Depth-phenomena does depend on onscreen lateral motion, left / right shifting of pictured elements relative to each other. As with audio stereo, middle seating is best; depth will expand with distance from the screen.

Locale is the upper-middle-class Stair Development newly built to provide housing for the executive class of IBM in Binghampton, on northern New York State’s “snow belt”. A beautiful, hilly, forested area of the globe, ripe for ‘development’, though at present spared due to economic decline due to manufacturing having been moved offshore. Please note the absence of sidewalks, of corner stores, of neighbourhood schools and therefore of a neighbourhood. We see a near-absence of people. Garages are connected to homes; residents do not step out, they drive out, in order to shop (anonymously) at a choice of malls, to go to work or to school or to meet with friends, etc. (kids are driven out to “play-dates” at other kids’ homes or are taken to and picked up from organised after-school programmes; they never simply gather after-school with neighbourhood chums). Such are the prize lives of the area, the IBM winners. We Americans tend to be the first humans among the world’s groupings to be so experimented on. If we seem to adapt, willingly jettisoning prior social arrangements, the new life-style is deemed ready for export. Look for a Stair Development coming your way! But do remember, when Cultural Imperialism is discussed, that, because the wave rolls over us first, and we are the first to be sold on giving up our ways, it should not be thought of as American Cultural Imperialism. It’s the world’s Corporate Future, with America as test-site.

Audio is side A of the LP “The Sensuous Woman”, circa 1969. It illustrates the near-instant co-opting and commodifying of The Sexual Revolution.

(Ken Jacobs, 2000)

Also Screening:
Thursday 2 November 2000, at 7:30pm, Brighton Cinematheque
Tuesday 7 November 2000, at 6:30pm, Glasgow Film Theatre
Thursday 30 November 2000, at 7:30pm, Hull Screen
Monday 4 December 2000, at 6:10pm, Manchester Cornerhouse
Wednesday 6 December 2000, at 9pm, London Lux Centre
Tuesday 12 December 2000, at 6:30pm, Sheffield Showroom

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Ken Jacobs Retrospective: 2

KEN JACOBS RETROSPECTIVE: PROGRAMME 2
Leeds International Film Festival
Saturday 14 October 2000, at 12:30pm

TOM, TOM THE PIPER’S SON
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1969-71, 16mm, 18fps, silent, b/w, & colour, 115 min

Cinematography assistant, Jordan Meyers. Negative matching assistant, Judy Dauterman. Florence Jacobs super-assisting throughout.

We had to work at night because of our skylight, but when Jordan wasn’t asleep at his feet at the Victor, projecting at the rear screen over Flo-in-bed, his eyes were open. Thank you again, Judy, for perseverance and loving good humour, and for encouraging and helping with the addition of the sliding film section.

Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer (and returned from limbo, rescued via Kemp Niver refilming a deteriorated paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress.) It is most reverently examined here, with a new movie almost incidentally coming into being.

Ghosts ! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. The preservation of their memory ceases at the edges of the frame (a 1905 hand happened to stick into the frame … it’s preserved, recorded in a spray of emulsion grains). One face passes ‘behind’ another on the two-dimensional screen.

The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. Seven infinitely complex cine-tapestries comprise the original film, and the style is not primitive, not un-cinematic, but an inspired indication of another, alternate path of cinematic development, its values only recently rediscovered. My camera closes in only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling and varying some visual complexes again and again for particular savouring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly looks out of an actor’s face), delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!

And then I wanted to show the actual present of the film, just begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close; I wanted to “bring to the surface” that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape … to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still … stirred to life by a successive 16-24 f.p.s. pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains ! the brains !) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to create the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion.

(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

“Anamnesis is a technical term referring to the recovery of anxiety-provoking incidents, a process that appropriately describes Jacobs’s extensive record of reworking of found footage. It begins in 1955 with the purchase of an analytical projector capable of variable speed projection in both forward and reverse. Evenings spent “toying” with this device, exploring the ‘inner workings” of the movie image culminated in the production of Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969-71), a two-hour visual exegesis of a ten-minute 1905 Biograph Company film shot by Billy Bitzer. Still his best-known work, Tom, Tom became critically ensconced as an avatar of the minimalist trend in avant-garde cinema dubbed Structural Film, a label Jacobs vehemently rejects. His object, as it were, was not a dry demonstration of mechanical properties of the medium but a magical raising of the dead: “Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead.” Refilming the Billy Bitzer tableaux, pictorially modelled after Hogarth, Jacobs slows down and isolates individual figures, capturing their casual distractions, their sensual movements and metaphoric encounters with other actors or props. He freeze-frames, reverses the motion, delves into ostensibly blank portions of painted backdrops.

“The humorous market day fable of the original is transformed into a truly carnivalesque parade of outlandish poses melting into authentic gestures of pleasure and vice versa, a hide-and-seek game of narrative role-playing ballasted by abstract shapes and balletic repetitions. As a side dish to Jacobs’s swelling feast, the art-historically inclined viewer is treated to a successive evocation of compositional styles, a selective review of modern painting that runs from Goya to the Impressionists and Seurat to Abstract Expressionists such as Franz Kline. Hidden archaeological details of the original are played against the constant recognition of moment-to-moment processes of refilming: flares, the foregrounded projector bulb, the placement of the translucent screen and, in a sequence shot in colour, a plant decorating the filmmaker’s loft. The ebb and flow of temporal strata is matched by the play of flatness and illusionistic depth.”

(Paul Arthur, excerpted from “Creating Spectacle From Dross: The Chimeric Cinema of Ken Jacobs”, first published in American Cinematographer magazine, 1997)

Also Screening:
Thursday 7 December 2000, at 7pm, London Lux Centre

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Ken Jacobs Retrospective: 3

KEN JACOBS RETROSPECTIVE: PROGRAMME 3
Leeds International Film Festival
Saturday 14 October 2000, at 3pm

INSTRUCTIONS TO AUDIENCE
In order to experience the added depth of the Pulfrich 3D effect, the viewer should use the “Eye Opener” filter during OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896. “Passing through the tunnel mid-film, a red flash will signal you to switch your single Pulfrich filter before your right you 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.”
PLEASE RETURN YOUR FILTER TO CINEMA STAFF AFTER THE SCREENING

THE WHIRLED
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1956-61, 16mm, b/w & colour, sound & silent, 15 min

Nasty overstuffed clogged and airless American fifties. The few good Hollywood films after the Left-dumping, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Sweet Smell of Success, etc., are skyscrapers on the Mojave. Overwhelmed, hopeless, it was a good time for irreverence. In particular, for art film in the vernacular, like an amusing letter, me to you. Sketchy, airy, anti-precious, without a lot of geniusing at the audience. Slices of imaginative life, not choosing to hide a N.Y. specific economic reality but I can dream, can’t I? Not anti-art, which my superiors, the critics of the period, assumed. To my bafflement. I had decided, with the examples of jazz improvisation and of action painting which would build on one impulsive stroke, and let things hang out indications of wrong turns towards the emerging clarity – not to edit and doll up the 100-foot camera rolls. But to let the film materials show, the Kodak perforations and start and end roll light flares; to feature the clicks and scratchings of the 78 r.p.m. records I pirated for accompaniment. Camera sequence as determined impulse upon impulse by the cinematographer seemed sensible to me, and to be respected. The off moments, vagaries, ’tis-human-toerrs, such beatings about the bush also delineated the bush; there was the example of Cezanne’s outlines, groping for the contour. Follow the impulses, I thought, and let appearances fall as they may. That’d be perfect enough.
(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

THE DOCTOR’S DREAM
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1978, 16mm, b/w, sound, 27 min

Original found material, a bland fifties TV movie. What’s important to know is that, in re-cutting it, nothing was done to make a point or be funny. It was cut blind. That is, according to scheme. Unexpectedly, something was learned about how hot secret messages are smuggled through (social) customs.
Sequential progression along conventional lines has the magic effect of disguising from the observer the real matter at hand. At the same time, it’s what the observer is really drawn to. It’s veiled, which allows the observer to have a powerful response to it and at the same time not feel guilty due to the taboo strictures of society.
(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

“… A quite different encounter with chance is registered in The Doctors Dream (78). Here an utterly vapid, sententious TV short from the Fifties about a country physician on an urgent house call to a sick child is reedited according to a simple formula. The opening shot of Jacobs’ revision is the exact median point in the narrative sequence and successive shots proceed toward either end, with the first and last shots placed next to each other at the finale. Even though a spectator may not grasp the precise ordering principle, it is clear that as Dream unfolds the gaps in narrative logic between adjacent shots become increasingly attenuated and bizarre. With time wrenched out of joint, conventional markers of cause and effect get waylaid, producing weirdly expressive conjunc­tions. The sick girl’s brother watches as she has blood drawn, then in the next shot stands weeping and praying for her deliverance; did the medical procedure cause her demise ? Slightly later, the girl jack-knifes through a series of shots: first gravely ill, then blithely dusting furniture, then once more on death’s door. Her unsettling dance of swoons and revivals hints at something more unearthly than the “Higher Power” invoked by the pious doe as her true salvation.
“Once again syntax is made strange as, for instance, clusters of medium shots of roughly the same subject bond in a fashion never permitted by standard editing practices. In this Kuleshov experiment in reverse, poetic themes and unsavoury character motives seem to leap from the restirred detritus: an emphasis on time and / as vision prompted by repeated close-ups of the doctor’s pocket watch and his fiddling over a microscope; the father looking daggers at the benevolent man of science, perhaps for good reason since his bedside manner takes on a treacly erotic dimension. As in many otherwise dissimilar Jacobs projects, one can in Dream sense with a veiled clarity the narrative gears at work, the interchangeable factory parts of master-shot and shot-countershot as they churned out an easily digestible product. On this occasion, however, what remains is less a cruel unmasking than a redemption – bad acting saved by dreamlike disjunctions, stupid lines recuperated by sinister associations.”
(Paul Arthur, excerpted from “Creating Spectacle From Dross: The Chimeric Cinema of Ken Jacobs”, first published in American Cinematographer magazine, 1987)

KEATON’S COPS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1991, 16mm, b/w, silent, 23 min

Original film by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton, 1922.
New arrangement by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs, 1991.

Some films are a joy to look at repeatedly, and also separately in their various parts. Here we see the bottom fifth of COPS. Our intention was to interfere with narrative coherence, to deny narrative dominance; to release the mind for a while from story and the structuring of incident, compelling as it is in Keaton’s masterly development. Our wide-screen re-filming limits seeing to the periphery of story, moves us from the easy reading of an illustrated text on to active seeing: what to make of this! Reduced information means we now must struggle to identify objects and places and, in particular, spaces. A broad tonal area remains flat, clings to the screen, until impacted upon by a recognisable something: Keaton smashes into it, say, and so it’s a wall, or a foot steps on it or a wheel rolls across it and it’s a road ! Shapes come into their own, odd and suggestive entities hinting at their own subconscious sub-narratives. We become conscious of a painterly screen alive with many shapes in many tones, playing back and forth between the 2D screen-plane and representation of a 3D movie-world, at the same time that we notice objects and activities (Keaton sets his comedy amidst actual street traffic) normally kept from mind by the moviestar-centred moviestory.
(Ken Jacobs, 2000)

PERFECT FILM
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1985, 16mm, b/w, sound, 22 min

TV newscast discard, out-takes of history reprinted as found in a Canal Street bin, with the exception of boosting volume second half.
A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi- conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry. “Editing”, the purposeful “pointing things out” that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle; we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all. Better to just be pointed to the territory, to put in time exploring, roughing it, on our own. For the straight scoop we need the whole scoop, no less than the clues entire and without rearrangement.
O, for a Museum of Found Footage, or cable channel, library, a shit-museum of telling discards accessible to all talented viewers/auditors. A wilderness haven salvaged from Entertainment.
(Ken Jacobs, statement in “Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective”, American Museum of the Moving Image, 1989)

“For Jacobs, “found” footage has less to do with appropriation than with appreciation. The bluntly titled Perfect Film is a 22-minute roll Jacobs discovered in a Canal Street junk bin and which he exhibits unaltered – an apparently random series of interviews and relevant exteriors taken by a TV news crew in the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination. Perfect Film opens with a white reporter interviewing a black eyewitness (himself a reporter), and everything in this unmediated slice of celluloid takes on equal weight – the witness’ faraway look, the way his experience becomes narrative, the camera-attracted mob (a Weegee crowd unfolding in time), the choice of camera angle, the interlocutor’s tone. Meanwhile other voices are heard. A white police inspector attempts to direct his presentation. A silent montage of streets, crowds, and cops sets off the re­curring interviews. Even the dead Malcolm appears in a 30-second clip to say that Elijah Muhammad has given the order that he is to be killed.
“More than a time capsule, Perfect Film is a study of how news is made, literally. These outtakes have their own integrity. There’s a structure here, even a revela­tory drama. What’s “perfect” is the demonstration that an anonymous work print found in the garbage can be as multi-layered and resonant, revealing and mysterious as a conscious work of art.
“I learned this – and a great deal more – from Jacobs, with whom I studied for several years at the height of the 60s. The era suited his outsized temperament as a teacher, Jacobs would never be mistaken for Mr. Chips. (Displeased with an article I wrote in the Voice, he once sent me a letter enumerating his accomplishments and adding, “I wish I could take them all away from you.”)”
(Jim Hoberman, excerpt from “Jacob’s Ladder”, Village Voice, 1989)

OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1990, 16mm, colour, sound, 9 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.
(Ken Jacobs, statement in London Film-Makers’ Co-Op Catalogue, 1993)

Scott MacDonald: Am I right that in Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 we see exactly the same footage forward and right-side up, then backward and upside down?
Ken Jacobs: Yes. The imagery is a collection of what were supposedly the first travelling shots by the Lumière company. The material switches directions, and you switch your filter from one eye to the other, halfway through. In the original sequence there were movements to the right and to the left, but the 3D effect only works when the filter is in front of the eye that corresponds to the direction of the movement, that is, so that when the filter is over the right eye, the foreground figures move in that direction. Some images are turned upside down to maintain the direction. The second pass is the same images in the same order, but the whole film is turned upside down and inside out: it ends with what was the first shot of the film, and whatever was upside down the first time is now right-side up and vice versa. The film is entirely symmetrical. Recently we’ve been toying around with train whistles. Right now there’s a train whistle at the very beginning, and another one halfway through, which is a signal to the audience to switch the filter to the other eye.
(Scott MacDonald interviews Ken Jacobs in “A Critical Cinema 3”, University of California Press, 1988)

Also Screening:

Friday 9 October 2000, at 6:45pm, Glasgow Film Theatre
Thursday 7 December 2000, at 9pm, London Lux Centre
Monday 11 December 2000, at 6:10pm, Manchester Cornerhouse
Thursday 14 December 2000, at 7:30pm, Hull Screen

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Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System Tour

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM
London Film Festival Touring Programme
Friday 3 – Friday 10 November 2000

Distinguished filmmaker Ken Jacobs will present the British premiere performances of the Nervous System, an innovative live projection technique that he has been developing since the mid-1970s. These works will use two adapted 35mm filmstrip projectors containing identical sections of film. Jacobs manipulates the footage by hand, using a special propeller device to act as an adjustable shutter to vary the relationship between the image from each projector. The Nervous System creates a dynamic optical tug-of-war as the mind tries to resolve what IS there with what seems to be there. This is no impenetrable experimental film for the avant-garde elite, it is dazzling cine-magic to astound all ages.

Assisted by his wife Florence, Jacobs operates the Nervous System like a master musician, improvising wildly through intensely rehearsed visual riffs, refining an approach first hinted at in his influential early film wonder Tom, Tom The Piper’s Son (1969). Freeze frames, forward and reverse motion, inverse and mirrored images flicker through the projector as viewers find themselves giggling with disbelief as the screen appears to rotate while the brain tries to interpret what the eyes are seeing. In undermining the basic 24 frames per second principle of standard film practice, Jacobs creates frozen time. Expanding on Muybridge, Marey and the theories of early film, he unlocks the unknown possibilities hidden deep within cinema, the depth of composition that is usually lost in the unretarded flurry of frames. What may appear frozen or stationary, on the screen can imperceptibly develop motion or suddenly rush forward in an orgasm of movement. The thrill of motion overtakes the need for narrative. Rather than pursue lifelike illusion, Jacobs uses Pulfrich 3D and “Eternalism” to break down the image, creating fantastic relationships within the frames of standard, often archival, film, mining cinema to display its unrealised beauty.

For the London Film Festival, Jacobs will present two very different programmes consisting of films and Nervous System pieces, including :-

Bi-Temporal Vision: The Sea (1994), a performance to be viewed through Pulfrich filters. Jacobs re-interprets 15 seconds of footage of reflections on water, producing paradoxical perceptions of movement, the illusion of 3D going beyond any titillating monster movie trick. The unstable, abstract imagery shifts in unbelievable complexity. “The mind is soon at sea, Rorschaching like crazy in the effort to maintain equilibrium”. Jacobs exploits the act of perception to bring to the cinema screen the sophisticated formalism of abstract expressionist or cubist composition.

Ontic Antics with Laurel & Hardy (1998). Using footage from Stan and Ollie’s 1929 short film Berth Marks, Jacobs takes us beyond slapstick, defying time, space and gravity to provide an unimagined visual comedy.

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM TOUR

Friday 3 November 2000, London Film Festival
OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896 (1990, 11 min) Pulfrich 3D 16mm film
BI-TEMPORAL VISION: THE SEA (1994, c.60-70 min) Pulfrich 3D Nervous System

Saturday 4 November 2000, London Film Festival
THE GEORGETOWN LOOP (1996, 11 min) widescreen 35mm film
ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL & HARDY (1998, 60 min) widescreen Nervous System
BERTH MARKS (1929, 18 min) the original Laurel & Hardy 16mm source film
DISORIENT EXPRESS (1996, 30 min) widescreen 35mm film

Sunday 5 November 2000, London Lux Centre
THE ALPS AND THE JEWS (1986-present, c.60-90 min) Pulfrich 3D dual slide / dual 16mm film (work-in-progress)
+ KIRK AND KERRY ( 1996, 25 min) film by Azazel Jacobs

Tuesday 7 November 2000, Oxford Phoenix Picture House
CRYSTAL PALACE (1997, 25 min) Nervous Magic Lantern
COUPLING (1996, 60 min) Nervous System

Thursday 9 November 2000, Manchester Cornerhouse
ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL & HARDY (1998, 60 min) widescreen Nervous System
BERTH MARKS (1929, 18 min) the original Laurel & Hardy 16mm source film
DISORIENT EXPRESS (1996, 30 min) widescreen 35mm film

Friday 10 November 2000, Nottingham Broadway Media Centre
CRYSTAL PALACE (1997, 25 min) Nervous Magic Lantern
DISORIENT EXPRESS (1996, 30 min) widescreen 35mm film
PHONOGRAPH (1990, 15 min) audiotape
SLOWSCAN (1981, 10 min) videotape by Ralph Hocking
JACOB’S LADDER (1981, 4 min) film by James Otis
UN PETIT TRAIN DE PLAISIR (1999, 30 min) Nervous System

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System is a BFI Touring Programme funded by the Arts Council of England and supported by the 44th Regus London Film Festival. The season is curated by Mark Webber.

Thank you Sandra Hebron, Tricia Tuttle, Helen De Witt, Emma Heddich, Catharine Des Forges, Joanna Denham, Ben Cook, Ken and Florence Jacobs.

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)

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 2

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM: 2
44th Regus London Film Festival
Saturday 4 November 2000, at 1pm

THE GEORGETOWN LOOP
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm, b/w, silent, 11 min
Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver.
I’ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. It’s a preserve of early cinema. Until 1912, in order to copyright film, one deposited with the library a positive from the negative printed on paper, unprojectable, but – unlike nitrate prints – capable of weathering the years without Crumbling into chemical volatility. And there the stacks rested, safely out of mind, hundreds and hundreds of silent rolls most less than 30 meters, many Edisons, American Mutoscope And Biograph, Gaumont, Lubin, Vitagraph …; cine-snatches of life as it was lived, vaudevillians, proto-dramas, and too many state parades. Until they were ripe for rediscovery and reevaluation, and rephotography back onto film. The Georgetown Loop is my 11-minute riff on “The Scenic Wonder of Colorado”, a rail-line built in the 1870s through daunting mountain terrain to serve the silver mining industry. I’ve called it the first landscape film deserving of an X-rating, and that it is, yet its secret subtitle is – I must whisper – (Celestial Railway). (Ken Jacobs)
“Elegantly reworking some 1906 footage of a train trip through the Colorado Rockies, the dean of radical filmmaking printed the original image and its mirror side by side to produce a stunning widescreen kaleidoscope effect. Did it really take 100 years of cinema for someone to execute this almost ridiculously simple idea ? “This landscape film deserves an X-rating”, says Jacobs.” (Jim Hoberman, Village Voice, 1996)

ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL AND HARDY
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1998, Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.60 min
“With his Nervous System film performances, Jacobs wrings changes out of startled frames and makes the infinitesimal matter. Ontic Antics with Laurel and Hardy – the simple shift of a vowel or the advance of a film frame creates a world of definition and character. Basking in that shade of difference he plumbs the frame with surgical decisiveness and amatory delicacy. Welcome to microtonal cinema. Taking Laurel and Hardy’s Berth Marks as point of departure, Jacobs supersedes slapstick, moving into the deeper dimensions of the human comedy. Psychological imbroglios, time-space predicaments, the unruliness of uncooperative gravity, the unlimited expressiveness of the limited body hallucinated into Rorschach-ing deliveries.” (Mark McElhatten)
Hardy walked a thin line between playing heavy and playing fatty. Laurel adopted a retarded squint, with suggestions of idiot savant. Their characters were at sea, clinging to each other as industrial capitalism was breaking up and sinking. Beautiful losers, they kept it funny, buoying our spirits. Laurel and Hardy … forever. (Ken Jacobs)

BERTH MARKS
Lewis R. Foster, USA, 1929, 16mm, b/w, sound, 18 min
Oliver Hardy goes to meet his partner Stan Laurel at the train station. They have a vaudeville act, which involves a bass fiddle, and are on their way to their next performance. They just barely make the train and are led to their berth, wreaking havoc amongst the other passengers in their wake. With much difficulty, they undress in their berth. As soon as they’re ready for bed, they arrive at Pottsville, their destination, and have to hurry off. Once the train has left the station, they discover that they have left their bass fiddle on board. But the situations aren’t important, it’s what the boys do with them – the way Ollie wanders around the station in search of Stan, just missing him several times, and the various contortions the pair try to get into their upper berth – that give the film its fun. Especially nice is the interchange between the boys and the conductor. When Ollie describes himself and Stan to the trainman as a “big-time vaudeville act”, the old man dryly replies, “Well, I bet you’re good !” (Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide)

DISORIENT EXPRESS
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm film, b/w, silent, 30 min
1906 – Original cinematographer unknown. 1996 – New arrangement by Ken Jacobs. Shots shown as found in “A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais”, the Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. Optically copied by Sam Bush, Western Cine Lab., Denver, from l6mm to 35mm letterbox format to allow double-image mirroring in 1:85 ratio projection.
The same string of shots, in their entirety, is repeated in various placement and directional permutations. But this film is not a lately arrived example of ‘‘Structural Cinema”, where methods of ordering film materials often came to take on paramount value. (The viewer at some point grasped the method and that could be pretty much it.) I’m for order only to the extent it provides possibilities of fresh experience. For instance, kaleidoscopic symmetry in Disorient Express is not an end in itself. The radiant patterning that affirms the screen plane serves also to provide visual events of an entirely other magnitude. Flat transmutes repeatedly to massive depth illusion; yet that which appears so forcefully, convincingly in depth is patently unreal – an irrational space. The obvious filmic flips and turns (method is always evident) of the scenic trip provide perceptual challenges to our understanding of reality, and we are often unable to see things as we know they are.
With light-source shifted from heaven-sent to infernal, we see a landscape that could never be, except via cinema. A very early recording of a train trip through mountainous terrain, enthusiasm of the adventurous passengers on boisterous display, lends itself to us for a ride into each our own Rorschach wilderness. This careening trip also demands some hanging on, some output of viewer energy. The rightness of the closure (as I see it) was made possible by copying the film, for the last pass, in reverse motion.
Disorient Express takes you someplace else. A spin lasting 30 minutes, you really need to tap into your own reserves of energy. Hang on, please, this is not formalist cinema; order interests me only to the extent that it can provide experience. Watch the flat screen give way to some kind of 3D thrust, look for impossible depth inversions, for jewelled splendour, for CATscans of the brain. I’m banking on this film reviving a yen for expanded consciousness. (Ken Jacobs)

Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 3

KEN JACOBS NERVOUS SYSTEM
London Lux Cinema
Sunday 5 November 2000, at 7pm

CRYSTAL PALACE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1997, Nervous Magic Lantern, b/w, sound, c.25 min
Impossible movements … impossible spaces … issue forth from a single, somewhat unusual slide projector (of British manufacture) employed in an unexpected way. Cinema without film or electronics. And, as with The Nervous System (utilising pairs of projectors), depth phenomena is produced that can be seen as such without special viewing spectacles, and even by a single eye. (Ken Jacobs)

THE WINTER FOOTAGE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1964/84, 16mm, colour, silent, 43 min
With Flo Jacobs, Bob Fleischner, Murray Greenberg, Bill Carpenter, Arty Rosenblatt, Storm De Hirsch, Louis Brigante, Dave Levenson, Diana Bachus, Bob Cowan, Ken Jacobs
Camera Movement enabled me to feel out my place among people and things. Lateral movement especially – because close objects pass faster than distant – located things in a depth my newly acquired zoom lens could play into, expanding and contracting, playing depth against flat-screen imagery. We lived alongside the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge, a ghost town nights and weekends. A big walker and looker, I became familiar with many objects comprising our neighbourhood, and invited them to the cine-dance I threw. Framing drew them together and split them in ways they could never understand but together we achieved some animation. Gravity held us all but when I moved and moved the camera it’s the scene that convulses onscreen. There were things on my mind, too, and certain persons, I found, could lend a face to them. For instance: Flo and I were marrying, slowly, with difficulty, and I looked to Storm and Louis (their domestic scene on the traffic safety island) for assurance that it needn’t mean personality extinction.
The impossible gathering about the fire of irreconcilable entities…I’d heard about a peace beyond understanding and I was trying for it (in real life I want no reconciling of Nazis and Jews as such). I needed a break from what I knew. I was interested in composing film only inasmuch as it served to compose me. It was my film, my necessary respite dream.
The Winter Footage comes between Baud’larian Capers 1963 (subtitled A Musical with Nazis and Jews) in which Flo starts to get to me, The Sky Socialist … in which we form a strawberry swirl. (Ken Jacobs)

KIRK AND KERRY
Azazel Jacobs, USA, 1996, 16mm, colour, sound, 25 min
A clash of realities: should he stay or should he go ? An actual couple, Kirk Acevedo and Kerry Johnson perform (or perhaps manifest) the problems of being a couple. The story takes place between given lines and documented feelings, resulting in an oil and water mix of film and life.
“This film excited me with its genuine curiosity about fictional characters and what we think we’re doing when we bring them to life. It’s a formal experimental film, with a frank and open interest in human beings.” (Hal Hartley, director)
“[Kirk and Kerry] incorporates the language of the American avant-garde into a film whose premises are in line with Cassavetes, Godard and Hal Hartley … Its subject matter is exactly of the moment. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” (Amy Taubin, The Village Voice)
“It’s a movie within a movie, and others have tried a similar idea, but I think I prefer this to all the others.” (Jonas Mekas, filmmaker)

NB: Unfortunately it was not possible to present “The Alps and The Jews” as originally advertised for this programme.

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Ken Jacobs’ Nervous System: 4

KEN JACOBS’ NERVOUS SYSTEM
Oxford Phoenix Picture House Cinema
Tuesday 7 November 2000, at 7pm

CRYSTAL PALACE
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1997, Nervous Magic Lantern, b/w, sound, c.25 min
Impossible movements … impossible spaces … issue forth from a single, somewhat unusual slide projector (of British manufacture) employed in an unexpected way. Cinema without film or electronics. And, as with The Nervous System (utilising pairs of projectors), depth phenomena is produced that can be seen as such without special viewing spectacles, and even by a single eye. (Ken Jacobs)

COUPLING
Ken Jacobs, USA, 1996, Nervous System, b/w, sound, c.60 min
Lumiere Brothers 1896 / Ken Jacobs 1996
A wide Paris street lined with small shops. Horse carriages and passers-by move freely about (there seem to be no designated traffic lanes). A wedding procession mounts church steps, advancing towards the camera. Their ascent remains stately throughout, if also spatially delirious. In keeping with the mystery of the nuptial sacrament, the bride in white – creature of light, of white movie screen – is allowed only a hint of facial features. Her older brother escorts her, the groom follows. The brother is Charles Molsson, the Lumiere machinist that built their first camera and hand wound the projector at The Grand Café, place of their first public screening. It is more than likely that this is the first wedding movie. (Ken Jacobs)

This performance was made possible thanks to the support of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Thanks to Kerry Brougher of MoMA and all at British Screen and Picture House Cinemas.