Recent Ken Jacobs

above: Capitalism: Child Labor

A month or two ago, Ken Jacobs visited campus. Some decontextualized, possibly misleading, possibly mis-transcribed quotes I took down:

"Art is the bastard of the mind."

"We're making a last stand for the mind."

"What you do on the web, we did in film."

On filmmaking for popular audiences: "I'm the people here... it's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dr. Jekyll tries his experiment out on himself first."

On his own films: "History can happen in multiple directions... It gets down to the roots of cinema... and where it could have gone."

On his friends in the '60s: "Poor people with imagination."

On treatment of actors: "Warhol didn't care about them... Jack [Smith] could have enjoyed someone's writhing in hell.

"Jack's in hell. Jack's tormented. But it's genuine!... Jack said, 'I think I should get AIDS... he was good boy, and he was going to torment himself... Fucked up."

"The $1.15/hour set."

On abstract expressionism and cubism: "It was done on paint. How could I do it on film?"

"...to lie big time and my lie would be seen through..."

"Art is not expression but suppression"

A film of his began to play and the projector failed.

"Just like old times... screwed up."

***

Vertov, in Man with a Movie Camera constantly slows down images to stills, then lets them speed up again, giving lie to the illusion and affirming its power. Jacobs, in his avant-garde films, does so more obsessively: playing films, then stopping them, slowing them, juxtaposing frames from seconds apart in which the background is the same, and the figure, who we’ve seen walk towards the camera, now lurches forward and back in a close-up and long-shot. Jacobs returns film to a magic-lantern show: a two-dimensional background photo, with silhouetted figures superimposed onto this world who move on their own as if in it.

This is most evident in his DV version of Two Wrenching Departures. I was only able to see the first half-hour of it, but it's quite a masterpiece.

***

Jacobs breaks down movies to their most basic premise, that the pictures actually move and take place in three dimensions, to reveal those obviously false assumptions as complete illusions even while we still assume them in watching his movies. He's obsessive--he makes tiny, forgotten gestures of everyday life take on epic significance as he plays them over endlessly in a constant attempt to make us more attuned to both real life and film's illusions. There's a tension between his intuitive, off-the-cuff impulses and obsessive-compulsive programming; he gives us the messiness of everyday life, and then shows us how it's been ordered in our perceptions, how limited what we get really is. Two Wrenching Departures is about the death of two friends and plays something like a failed resuscitation; their halting movements in looping footage, giving way to slow-motion bounding, play like a flipbook flipped one page at a time. The movie only emphasizes that all that's physically left of these guys is a bunch of still images put together, even as these images, as in Vertov, look to come to life.

***

Jacobs' recent work is done on DV, a format in which there is no rapid flickering of still images, as in projected film; so instead (again like Vertov), Jacobs reinstates it constantly, inserting pauses between images to simulate, once again, the flipbook effect of still images just starting to move. This may be a natural effect in his live show slideshows, as the images seem to flutter back and forth, in and out of focus--another attempt to recreate early cinema in its most primitive effects, though his recent series, Capitalism, is in turn an attempt to recreate the effects of these slideshows. Capitalism: Slavery and Capitalism: Child Labor take stereographs from around the time cinema was invented and tear into them as though the pictures were in the throes of an epileptic seizure: blinking like hell, the movies slightly adjust the position of their respective pictures from image to image in relation to the camera (probably by rotating between the two images on each stereograph), so that it appears as though Jacobs has opened up the pictures to three dimensions and is circling around and jumping in on the figures in both, even while he's simply wavering back and forth between a couple images and going nowhere at all. To get some idea of the effect, go here, and click fast.


In closing in on individual details within these pictures--of slavery, of child labor--Jacobs obviously means to politicize these matter-of-fact portraits of typical exploitation by focusing on individual elements of possible cruelties, like the bare feet of a child in a factory, and by asserting the individuality of each of the men and women of the dehumanized masses. But what makes Capitalism: Child Labor so good is how his throbbing/blinking/flickering effect, endlessly reiterating the same few images, perfectly matches the infinite repetitions of elements in the mass production of the factory system--elements which Jacobs is, within the film, obviously trying to draw attention to. 14 minutes long, the film itself, totally unbearable, feels like it'll never end. There were times I was sure I was asleep watching it when I was completely awake; similarly, Jacobs manages to bring the nondescript two-dimensional image to full life, giving the picture of capitalism's standardization of horrors its full force as total living hell.