SPATIAL \/ TEMPORAL PLASTICITY IN KEN JACOBS\u2019 NERVOUS SYSTEM FILM PERFORMANCES<\/strong><\/p>\n\u201c21\/2 D\u201d is hard to conceive. Things should be either flat or in depth. Yet the lit rectangle doubly cast by The Nervous System evidences, embroiled together obscenely, the flat \u2013 the usual illusion of forms reshaping as they slide across the screen, one with the screen \u2013 and the deep \u2013 here the screen fragmented perpendicular to the line of view, its surface seemingly divided among myriad objects reaching forward and back of the actual plane of focus \u2013 and something in-between, with both flat and deep claiming appearances unto their respective realms. Things get twisted, caught in this tug-of-war. It\u2019s The Nervous System, putting the tangle into rectangle, and leaving it a wreck. (The contemplation of it strains our brains.)<\/p>\n
Not only things pictured but the rectangle itself is caught in the struggle and becomes spatially unstable, advancing or sinking in depth, stretching or compacting, leaning, tilting, swinging, rising, falling, splitting, peeling off the screen. The rectangle itself in motion becomes a creature of time.<\/p>\n
\u201cTime \/ motion\u201d study hardly suggests the exercise in ecstasy this can be. Or that we\u2019re touching on the essence of cinema, its original impetus. I\u2019ve returned to that place (not alone) after a near-century of cinema \u201crationalised\u201d, mechanically standardised, phenomenologically fixed, to at last and at the least bring it abreast of the development in the visual arts known as cubism. I think it\u2019s about time.<\/p>\n
Toying with light, with phantasm, can also open time to fantastic changes. Temporal illusions of another order from the intellectual expansions\/contractions of Griffith and Eisenstein, what were in fact literary understandings of time, intricacies of ordering only sometimes moving into modernist derangement and delirium, into the transcendent (rather than escapist) function of art. Explain a time \u2026 in which things race forward, with bursting velocity, moving, moving ever forward, and yet don\u2019t cover an inch of space (time arrested while remaining time, i.e. with things in motion) \u2026 without the projectionist\u2019s permission. Or perhaps as wheels clearly turn forward, legs stride forward, they do so while irresistibly moving backwards \u2026 direction and evolvement in time as well as space in the control of the cine-puppeteer.<\/p>\n
Well, what moves the puppeteer ? The very specific possibilities inherent to a particular strand of film. This frame times that frame equals \u2026 it\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess until discovery of the exact formula of projection adjustments makes it happen, and often it\u2019s an effect unique to that coupling, that formula. Control, then, is a matter of attending very closely to what\u2019s on<\/em> the film. One tries this and that, but the givens of the shot, and their impact on the performer-projectionist, swing the action.<\/p>\n(Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\n
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Alina Rudnitskaya\u2019s humanistic approach to documentary filmmaking often brings out the humour in her chosen subjects. As an introduction to her work, this programme depicts three diverse groups of contemporary Russian women.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken-jacobs-nervous-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1768"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1768\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markwebber.org.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}