AIRSHAFT (1967, 16mm, 16fps, silent, colour, 4m)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)
THE DOCTOR'S DREAM (1978, 16mm, 24fps, optical sound, black and white, 27m)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 open-ing 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 narra-tive 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 fash-ion never permitted by standard editing practices. In this Kuleshov experiment in reverse, poetic themes and unsavoury char-acter motives seem to leap from the re-stirred 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 dissim-ilar 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 dream-like disjunctions, stupid lines recuper-ated by sinister associations."
(Paul Arthur, excerpted from "Creating Spectacle From Dross: The Chimeric Cinema of Ken Jacobs", first published in American Cinematographer magazine, 1987)
GLOBE (1969, 16mm, 24fps, optical sound, colour, 22m)Formerly titled EXCERPT FROM THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
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.)"
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)
KEATON'S COPS (1991, 16mm, 24fps, silent, black and white, 23m)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)
NISSAN ARIANA WINDOW (1969, 16mm, 18fps, silent, colour, 14m)Our daughter's name. Something to wrap up this obsession with homes, finding and making homes their ephemeral quality, the believing-makes-it-so pathos of them, the crazy landslide terrain we desperate creatures stick them on for want of bedrock; bedrock ! Flo and me used to go to a theatre on Second Avenue that showed old Yiddish films with stage shows in which old Yiddish vaudeville cadavers romped with all the electric energy they once displayed to Kafka. One Polish movie, Without a Home, had a subsidiary character, a ne'er-do-well amiable scholar named Fedel. One scene showed him at his breakfast table in his sunny old-world poverty digs, cracking open his soft-boiled breakfast egg - this said everything - with a tuning fork, to which he then listened. Anyway, the film: We see both Flo and pet cat China pregnant. Expecting. Then a brief pause in darkness, for the movie magic to work, and there's the kid, and kittens. Not so easy to fix on film a picture of the little adventurer. No happier ending than our kitten in its catbox. Home movies are my favourite.
(Ken Jacobs, statement in "Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective" (American Museum of the Moving Image), 1989)
OPENING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: 1896 (1990, 9m, 16mm, 24fps, optical sound, colour)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."
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 up-side down?
Ken Jacobs: Yes. The imagery is a collection of what were supposedly the first travelling shots by the Lumiere 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 up-side 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)
PERFECT FILM (1985, 16mm, 24fps, optical sound, black and white, 22m)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 appreci-ation. 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 unme-diated 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 re-curring 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 revela-tory 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)
SOFT RAIN (1968, 16mm, 16fps, silent, colour, 12m)
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)
TOM, TOM THE PIPER'S SON (1969-71, 16mm, 18fps, silent, black and white & colour, 115m)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 inci-dents, 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 produc-tion 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 ostensi-bly 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)
TOM, TOM THE PIPER'S SON is now available on video from RE: VOIR
URBAN PEASANTS (1975, 16mm, 18fps, sound on cassette, black and white, 50m)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 Bi-robidzhan, 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 punchline: "I am an American Everything is all right." Jacobs's de-ceptively 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)
THE WHIRLED (1956-61, 16mm, 24fps, optical sound & silent, black and white & colour, 15m)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-to-errs, 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
WINDOW (1964, 16mm, 18fps, silent, colour, 12m)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 mar-vellously 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: con-trasts 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 ob-jects 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. Transform-ing 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)
