Sebastian and Jonas Leaving the Party (2019)
(Warning: Flashing lights.)
The prolific Ken Jacobs, whose avant-garde epics transform archival footage into anaglyphs to create stunning simulations of depth, has often made his work freely available to the public, usually in the form of short GIFs on his Twitter and excerpts of his films on his Vimeo page. However, a recent batch of invaluable uploads expand this collection with the inclusion of the full-length films Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008) and A Primer in Sky Socialism 2-D (2014), Popeye Quartet (a compilation comprised of four shorts), and the shorts Painted Poster, Rain Clouds, and Sebastian and Jonas Leaving the Party (2019).
Jacobs's Return to the Scene of the Crime sets the stage for the latter experimentations: The filmmaker isolates a single shot from the 1905 short Tom Tom, The Piper's Son (the subject of Jacobs's 1969 film of the same name) and proceeds to repeat and deconstruct the footage into its many parts. The film concludes with a note by Jacobs, praising the "vivacious intricate stage-business" of the event, though quizzical as to whether it was invented or documented. That interaction between the staging and stumbling upon of life's theatre and the intervention of the filmmaker then becomes the focus of the films that follow. As Notebook editor Daniel Kasman writes in his review of the film, "The Return to the Scene of the Crime is intervention—a wonderful one—as an act of creative and historical criticism to excavate, as it were, the density and richness of this specific film."
The 2014 film A Primer in Sky Socialism 2-D features the Brooklyn Bridge, a "cathedral of the sky," on New Year's Eve. The film, like Return to the Scene of the Crime, continues a previous film by Jacobs entitled The Sky Socialist, which itself was a tribute to civil engineer John A. Roebling, the bridge builder. Without any of the anaglyph layering present in Jacobs's other videos, A Primer in Sky Socialism 2-D instead presents stills of a New Year's night. Strings of light appear like fireworks that expand across the sky, above the heads of the pedestrians crossing Roebling's creation. For a better idea of what Sky Socialism looks like in its three-dimensional form, the Popeye Quartet presents several of Jacobs's excursions through New York City with the occasional 2D still. And though Jacobs does note that the dizzying "rapid alternation is not for everyone," he firmly states that rapid alternation of "positive and negative images is at the heart of Eternalism, allowing us to see in 3D without 3D technology."
It is worth mentioning here that Eternalism, or the technique that enables "3D without 3D technology" is a procedure of Jacobs's own design, a patented technology that repeats a series of three pictures (or frames) for a "plurality of times to create an illusion of sustained, ongoing motion with a degree of three-dimensionality, with synchronous Pulfrich light-filtering available to enhance the effect." In an essay entitled "Two-Eyed Paintings," Jacobs writes: "3D cinema allows me to present literally unimaginable sights that with familiarity become imaginable, picture-able in mind." That a number of his films focus on divorcing memory from the flat 2D of photography and instead merging it with 3D suggests that Jacobs is also keen to present new dimensions of familiar feelings, including love, friendship, and other forms of togetherness. In light of this, the most significant of these newly available films may be Sebastian and Jonas Leaving the Party, which Jacobs points out is his last image of the late filmmaker Jonas Mekas, who likewise used both analog and, later, digital, for his diaristic portraits of a life dedicated to art.