Politics, Eternalisms, and the Mad Science of Ken Jacobs

Perhaps the greatest benefit of digital cinema is the vast wealth of moving-image art – from all parts of the world and every period of film history – that has become available to cinephiles equipped with a modest array of electronic paraphernalia. No region of the movie cosmos has profited more from this development than the rarified realm variously called the avant-garde, the experimental, and the underground. Films of this ilk could be hard to see in bygone times, when new works by such towering visionaries as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Su Friedrich, and Hollis Frampton were viewable only by those with access to museums, universities, and specialized showplaces like New York’s fabled Anthology Film Archives and its counterparts in other big cities. But now a gradually increasing amount of avant-garde cinema can be seen by all interested parties, thanks to a handful of enterprising Blu-ray and DVD producers such as the Criterion Collection, Kino Lorber, and Milestone Films, current leaders in the field.¹

No recent release is more welcome than the Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1, a two-disk compendium of major and minor works by the eponymous filmmaker. True, the title bestowed on it by Kino Classics is not entirely clear: Is there a Vol. 2? Or will there be a Vol. 2? Or is Vol. 2 actually The Ken Jacobs Not on Blu-ray Bundle, a group of seven works available on the Kino Now streaming platform? Be this as it may, both the Blu-ray set and the streaming package are invaluable for Jacobs aficionados and offer excellent points of entry for newcomers to his inimitable artistry.

It’s slightly ironic that Jacobs’s work has become so readily available, since he was a much an in-person performance artist as a filmmaker during a large portion of his career. His most radical and important innovation is the marvelously named Nervous System, whereby two analytic projectors cast nearly identical frames onto a single screen in rapid alternation produced by a spinning propellor that blocks off the light of each projector in turn. Jacobs developed and deployed this device from the early 1980s until about 2000, controlling the exhibition process as it happened. Among its other capacities, the Nervous System generates a 3D effect and plays into Jacobs’s endless fascination with depth perception, which he has also explored through other methods, such as inviting audiences to watch projected images while holding a piece of darkened celluloid over one eye, throwing that eye into night vision, or crossing their eyes while viewing the double images taken by a stereoscopic movie camera. For me, the latter methods create much better 3D than the Nervous System does, but the Nervous System produces the most exhilarating spectacle, pulsing and throbbing with kinetic energy so vigorous that people with photosensitive epilepsy and similar conditions are advised to avoid it. For many years the only way to experience Jacobs’s work was to attend screenings, but the advent of DVD convinced him that video was a viable exhibition format, and material started appearing on disk, a notable example being Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly!, a 2006 masterpiece that expands and explodes Lewis R. Foster’s 1929 short Berth Marks, itself a masterpiece of comic-claustrophobic cinema. By now a fair amount of Jacobs’s work is available via streaming on YouTube and Vimeo, and the Kino Lorber releases mark another big step forward in mainstreaming this extraordinary artist.

The selections on the Blu-ray disks provide a condensed history of Jacobs’s evolution. His first film, Orchard Street, is a beautifully observed 1955 documentary about a beloved neighborhood in lower Manhattan, lyrically shot and gracefully edited. The Whirled is more fragmented, bringing together four individually made shorts: Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice (1956), Little Cobra Dance (1956), Hunch Your Back (1963, incorporating footage of Ken improbably appearing on a television game show), and Death of P’Town (1961), with a great deal of screen time devoted to Jack Smith, the legendary filmmaker and performer with whom Jacobs had a longtime off-and-on professional relationship. Smith is also a central presence in two signature works of 1963, Little Stabs at Happiness, a multipart meditation on Lower East Side living, and Blonde Cobra, crafted by Jacobs from anarchic footage shot by Bob Fleischner, a likeminded filmmaker. More imposing is The Sky Socialist (1964–66), a feature-length sociopolitical fable in which real and imagined figures – the Jewish martyr Anne Frank, the writer and teacher Isadore Lhevinne, the hopeful Muse of Cinema, the whip-wielding Nazi Mentality, and others – caper about in the literal or figurative shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, after which the film is named. The set also includes The Sky Socialist: Environs and Outtakes, a 1964–66 spinoff work presented, like the longer film that spawned it, in a definitive reworking from 2019. The grandest item on the second disk is another signature work, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, a 1969 extravaganza that stretches a fleetingly brief 1905 one-reeler into almost two hours of rephotographed, reedited, and drastically rejiggered structural cinema. Here again there is a spinoff film, A Tom Tom Chaser from 2002, followed by two works that exemplify the uncompromising political concerns that directly or indirectly underpin all of Jacobs’s activities: Capitalism: Child Labor and Capitalism: Slavery, a pair of 2006 shorts that translate mournfully revealing historical images into “eternalisms,” Jacobs’s term for the pulsating manifestations engendered by his idiosyncratic techniques. Also on the Blu-ray are Window (1964), The Georgetown Loop (1996), and Movie That Invites Pausing, a wholly abstract work from 2021 that rewards the eye when paused and also when viewed straight through. A video conversation between Jacobs and the astute film scholar Tom Gunning is appended as an extra.

Several of the films on the Kino Lorber disks are essential works in film history as well as Jacobs’s own career. The lineup streaming on Kino Now is more recent and has therefore done less to shape the fortunes of avant-garde cinema, but much of it is equally enthralling, if not more so. The excitement starts with Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World, a 2006 feature that intersperses swirling amusement-park footage with nonfigurative designs ablaze with color and movement. Return to the Scene of the Crime (2021) does the seemingly impossible, actually improving on Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son with fresh editing choices, digitally enhanced imagery of superb quality, and violinist Malcolm Goldstein’s characteristically amazing music. Here it’s worth underscoring the point that few (if any) of Jacobs’s works are purely esthetic exercises; as rollicking as this picture is, a concluding text calls it an antidote to “the spectacle of our courts and politicians playing dumb while USA descends to Nazi levels….” Seeking the Monkey King (2011) makes the politics more overt, punctuating a stream of kaleidoscopic eternalisms with slogans and statements that are vastly less subtle than the cinema they interrupt. (Sample: “500 years of b.s. in an overnight collapse communist subversion never got its chance.”) Subtlety vanishes completely in the tendentiously titled Reichstag 9/11: Some eyewitness images on the web, a 2016 montage of documentary materials from the internet transformed into eternalisms that run the danger of aestheticizing the horrors of the September 11 attacks, a rare miscalculation on Jacobs’s part. The semiautobiographical short Failure (2019) also lapses into strident verbiage (“Global warming remains denied by Republicans on orders of the American oligarchy…”) that is fortunately overwhelmed by the splendor of the semiabstract visuals. Things to Come is an elegant mélange of nonfigurative designs, historical footage, and protest of American racism. The concluding item, The Whole Shebang, employs bizarre footage from a 1930s novelty film, subsequently turned into a 1982 projection-performance and now computerized in a bravura act of digital magic.

In a booklet essay for the Blu-ray release, the redoubtable critic J. Hoberman says that the Nervous System works are “un-DVD-able,” and while there’s some truth in that, Jacobs has transcended the problem by making ingenious use of new moving-image technologies as they have come on the scene. He has also benefited from a career-long partnership with his wife, Flo Jacobs, who has been crucial to his creative life, and from the contributions of their daughter, Nisi Jacobs, a major collaborator in recent years. (Their son, Azazel Jacobs, has become a flourishing narrative filmmaker in his own right.) He has produced an enormous amount of cinema, and many interesting works not yet on disk – such as Urban Peasants (1975), Perfect Film (1986), and The Doctor’s Dream (1978), all found-footage films – certainly deserve to be. Note also that Two Wrenching Departures (2006), an emotionally powerful Nervous System work initially performed in 1989, was revised for DVD in 2006. Most colossal of all is the magnum opus Star Spangled to Death, clocking in at around seven hours and available as a four-disk set on Jacobs’s own Big Commotion Pictures label. It is as big and bold a venture as Jacobs has ever undertaken.

I have known Ken for decades – we were lower Manhattan near-neighbors for quite a while – and I have attended many a Jacobs screening, watched him experiment with shadow play, and seen the Nervous System with great pleasure in assorted venues. The variety of his work is prodigious, but pretty much all of it reflects an overarching goal he once described to me: “To see where [my mind] will take me, and where this technology will take me… And to exercise this power in a way that doesn’t mean enslavement or subjugation to others” (Sterritt 2008).² Theorizing his aims some years ago, I formulated his “intuitive philosophical goal” in terms derived from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari):³ Jacobs’s aspiration is not to comprehend or explain the infinite field of existential possibilities, but “to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it…as the outside and inside of thought, as…that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought” (Sterritt 2013).⁴ Jacobs read philosopher Henri Bergson as a young man, and his ideas are as sophisticated as his art. I regard him as one of the premiere mad scientists of the cinematic universe, and I am thrilled that his films, eternalisms, and unclassifiable whatsits are finding new outlets and audiences as he approaches his 90th year. My hat is permanently off to Ken and company, and to the thrilling eternalisms they have pioneered.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Sterritt

David Sterritt, editor in chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, wrote about Ken Jacobs many times during almost 40 years as film critic of The Christian Science Monitor.

Notes

1 See for example the Maya Deren Collection, a Kino Lorber disc containing such classics as Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and At Land (1944) as well as an hour of footage from Deren’s unfinished Divine Horsemen project; Milestone’s set The Magic Box: The Films of Shirley Clarke, three discs with more than eight hours of material; and Criterion’s A Hollis Frampton Odyssey and two volumes of By Brakhage: An Anthology.

2 Sterritt, “Ken Jacobs,” p. 99.

3 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, pp. 59–60.

4 Sterritt, “Wrenching Departures,” p. 105. Quotation on pp. 59–60.