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KEN JACOBS\u2019 NERVOUS SYSTEM: 2 THE GEORGETOWN LOOP ONTIC ANTICS STARRING LAUREL AND HARDY<\/strong> BERTH MARKS DISORIENT EXPRESS NOTES ON THE NERVOUS SYSTEM<\/strong><\/p>\n The Nervous System consists, very basically, of two identical prints on two projectors capable of single-frame advance and \u201cfreeze\u201d (turning the movie back into a series of closely related slides.) The twin prints plod through the projectors, frame \u2026 by \u2026 frame, in various degrees of synchronisation. Most often there\u2019s only a single frame difference. Difference makes for movement, and uncanny three-dimensional space illusions via a shuttling 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 (which takes some getting used to, then becoming no more difficult than following a sunset through passing trees from a moving car) is necessary to create \u201ceternalisms\u201d \u2013 unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed). For instance, without discernible start and stop and repeat points a neck may turn \u2026 eternally.<\/p>\n The aim is neither to achieve a life-like nor a Black Lagoon 3D illusionism, but to pull a tense plastic play of volume configurations and movements out of standard (2D) pictorial patterning. The space I mean to contract<\/em>, however, is between now and then, that other present that dropped its shadow on film.<\/p>\n I enjoy mining existing film, seeing what film remembers, what\u2019s missed when it clacks by at Normal Speed. Normal Speed is good ! It tells us stories and much more but it is inefficient in gleaning all possible information from the film-ribbon. And there\u2019s already so much film. Let\u2019s draw some of it out for a deep look, sometimes mix with it, take it further or at least into a new light with flexible expressive projection. We\u2019re urban creatures, sadly, living in movies, i.e. forceful transmissions of other people\u2019s ideas. To film our environment is to film film; it\u2019s also a desperate approach to learning our own minds.<\/p>\n What I\u2019m trying to do is shape a poetry of motion, time \/ motion studies touched and shifted with a concern for how things feel, to open fresh territory for sentient exploration, creating spectacle from dross \u2026 delving and learning beyond the intended message or cover-up, seeing how much history can be salvaged when film is wrested from glib 24 f.p.s. To tell a story in new ways, relating new energy components (words are energy components to a poet) in a system of construction natural to their particularity. To memorialise. To warn.<\/p>\n (Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\n
\n<\/strong>44th Regus London Film Festival
\nSaturday 4 November 2000, at 1pm<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nKen Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm, b\/w, silent, 11 min
\n<\/strong>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.
\n<\/em>I\u2019ve been raiding the Paper Print Collection of the Library Of Congress in Washington, DC, since the late 1960s with Tom, Tom, the Piper\u2019s Son<\/em>. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 unlike nitrate prints \u2013 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 \u2026; 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<\/em> is my 11-minute riff on \u201cThe Scenic Wonder of Colorado\u201d, a rail-line built in the 1870s through daunting mountain terrain to serve the silver mining industry. I\u2019ve called it the first landscape film deserving of an X-rating, and that it is, yet its secret subtitle is \u2013 I must whisper \u2013 (Celestial Railway). (Ken Jacobs)
\n\u201cElegantly 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 ? \u201cThis landscape film deserves an X-rating\u201d, says Jacobs.\u201d (Jim Hoberman, Village Voice, 1996)<\/p>\n
\nKen Jacobs, USA, 1998, Nervous System, b\/w, sound, c.60 min
\n<\/strong>\u201cWith his Nervous System film performances, Jacobs wrings changes out of startled frames and makes the infinitesimal matter. Ontic Antics with Laurel and Hardy<\/em> \u2013 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\u2019s Berth Marks<\/em> 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.\u201d (Mark McElhatten)
\nHardy 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 \u2026 forever. (Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\n
\nLewis R. Foster, USA, 1929, 16mm, b\/w, sound, 18 min
\n<\/strong>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\u2019re 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\u2019t important, it\u2019s what the boys do with them \u2013 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 \u2013 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 \u201cbig-time vaudeville act\u201d, the old man dryly replies, \u201cWell, I bet you\u2019re good !\u201d (Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide)<\/p>\n
\nKen Jacobs, USA, 1996, 35mm film, b\/w, silent, 30 min
\n<\/strong>1906 \u2013 Original cinematographer unknown. 1996 \u2013 New arrangement by Ken Jacobs. Shots shown as found in \u201cA Trip Down Mount Tamalpais\u201d, 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.<\/em>
\nThe 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 \u2018\u2018Structural Cinema\u201d, 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\u2019m for order only to the extent it provides possibilities of fresh experience. For instance, kaleidoscopic symmetry in Disorient Express<\/em> 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 \u2013 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.
\nWith 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.
\nDisorient Express<\/em> 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<\/em>; 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\u2019m banking on this film reviving a yen for expanded consciousness. (Ken Jacobs)<\/p>\nFURTHER NOTES<\/a>