Rough Ride; Amy Taubin on Ken Jacobs.
Taubin, Amy
IN 2006, KEN JACOBS took a one-minute film produced in 1903 by
Thomas Edison and made of it an infernal machine. The title of the
Edison film is Razzle Dazzle. Jacobs calls his version Razzle Dazzle:
The Lost World. The subtitle refers to the world of the original film,
which Jacobs excavates for ninety-two minutes to reveal the skull
beneath the skin. Then, too, the lost world is our own.
Jacobs's Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969)--an American
avant-garde classic, added to the National Film Registry last year--is
similarly based on an early movie, G. W. "Billy" Bitzer's
1905 adaptation of the cautionary nursery rhyme. Jacobs refilmed the
original (which depicts the adventures of Tom and his purloined pig),
using what now seem like laughably primitive tools: a 16 mm Arriflex
camera and a variable-speed projector. A demanding, formally elegant,
meditative work, Jacobs's Tom, Tom has perhaps been best described
by the filmmaker himself:
Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long
dead. ... 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 ... stirred to life by a
successive 16-24 fps pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies ...
collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant
because-always-past illusion.
The passions that carried Jacobs from Tom, Tom to Razzle Dazzle,
and through the scores of live 2-D and 3-D shadow plays and
"Nervous System" and "Nervous Magic Lantern"
performances in between, are implicit in the filmmaker's statement:
the dedication to history as it is inscribed in the photographic image;
rescue and redemption through an art of detritus--recuperating not only
"valueless" cultural objects but human beings as well (witness
the outcasts who populate such early-Jacobs films as Blonde Cobra
[1959-63] and his seven-hour epic, Star Spangled to Death [1956-2004]);
the exploration of the act of seeing in all its
optical/neurological/psychological complexity and, correspondingly, of
the properties of the filmmaking and exhibiting apparatus and the film
material itself; and the desire to up the ante on the illusionary
three-dimensionality of movies to create images that are as head butting
and immersive as they are ephemeral.
A painter before he became a filmmaker, Jacobs was a student of
Hans Hofmann, and Hofmann's injunction to "manifest a
three-dimensional event on a two-dimensional surface" has been,
formally, the point of departure for all of Jacobs's moving-image
work. The intensity of Jacobs's movies and film performances, which
honor abstraction without being abstract, is not, however, a matter of
optical effects. His works go to the heart of our belief system by both
mining and undermining photographic illusionism, and they are impelled by a rage against capitalism and its basis in an economy of war.
About ten years ago, Jacobs began to translate his "Nervous
System" analog method of examining found footage (essentially, he
built a moving-image stereopticon using two variable-speed projectors
with a shared shutter configured to produce a strobe effect) into
digital postproduction software. Razzle Dazzle is one of several
features and dozens of shorts that have resulted from this visionary
approach to digital technology that's all the more astonishing given that Jacobs is seventy-five years old. For Razzle Dazzle, Jacobs
and his assistant, digital whiz kid Erik Nelson, souped up two standard
video-editing programs--Final Cut Pro and Modul8--to create a viscerally
and kinetically pulverizing experience of horror.
The underlying metaphor of Razzle Dazzle is innocence taken for a
ride. Edison's short depicts an amusement-park attraction, the
Razzle Dazzle, a spinning, undulating, doughnut-shaped platform
suspended from a maypolelike base. Girls of all ages in white summer
frocks sit. with legs dangling over the edge of the contraption as it
revolves. Almost from the first frame, Jacobs's movie evokes the
queasy sensation and also the thrill of such rides. The stagger-stop
movement of the images, the high-contrast close-ups of bone-white faces
falling through blackness, the scratchy recording of a diregilike piano
waltz, the startling thunderclaps, and the continuously strobing light
elicit a feeling of dread, intensified by the red that has seeped into
the image like dripping blood. Intermittently, Jacobs interrupts the
digital manipulations of Edison's film with a "Nervous
System" treatment of groups of stereopticon images that together
suggest the United States' expansionist tendencies at the turn of
the nineteenth century which led to the bloody battlefields of the
Spanish-American War and World War I. Just before the most horrific of
the war images, Edison himself is heard on the sound track praising the
valor of America and her allies in the Great War.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Razzle Dazzle's progression toward death and destruction is
punctuated by moments in which the digital transformation of space and
time is so surprising and, yes, aesthetically satisfying that it takes
your breath away. But eventually the honor becomes all-encompassing. The
image, turning opalescent green and blue, seems to ooze and decay.
Finally, a globe compacted out of skulls and bones spins over a field of
skeletons. In the briefest of codas, Jacobs gives us a glimpse of hope:
The laughing face of one of the young girls emerges from the darkness
and, like a phantom, comes to greet us.
Ken Jacobs's Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World is being screened
at Antibiology Film Archives in New York from June 27 through July .3.
AMY TAUBIN IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF FILM COMMENT AND SIGHT &
SOUND.
