Above: Things to Come
Possessing a creative ingenuity that’s persisted for well over six decades, while working within several different artistic mediums—including film celluloid, digital, and his Nervous Magic Lantern performances that incorporated neither—the ever-prolific Ken Jacobs, rather miraculously for our sakes, continues to teach us new ways to see. This is an admittedly vague summation of the film artist’s theoretical interests over the past half-century, although, for a creator of Jacobs’s stature and temperament, it’s the most accurate thing one can apply to the vast majority of his efforts. His lessons follow twofold, and like all great instructors (it’s important to note that he, along with Larry Gottheim, founded the first cinema studies department in the country at Binghamton University, where both taught regularly for over thirty years) allow his students the pleasure of discovering different schools of thought through speculative means: there’s the literal re-evaluation of moving images he provides, often fixating on the details one can easily take for granted; then, there’s a secondary education that takes place after the first, where one begins to question how they looked at these images so carelessly on an initial viewing. One of his most significant feature-length projects, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969), accomplishes these goals through intense duration and technical manipulation of outside media, forcing viewers to actively engage with the materiality of the film they’re watching. It’s bookended by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer’s 1905 short of the same name, serving as a sort of “before and after” for Jacobs’ pedagogical experiment, one that changes drastically on a second viewing, almost as if seeing it for the first time again. There’s an air of condescension with this structural choice—more pointedly, that Jacobs feels entitled to claim that he’s taught anyone anything by adjusting projection speeds—and one that Jacobs himself has picked up on—he’s called his own Tom, Tom “a piece of shit” and “boring.”
He was far more congenial regarding his most recent output during a recent screening event at the Museum of Modern Art, one which took place in mid-January and incorporated two different shorts he completed in 2019—along with a new restoration of his little-seen 1975 feature, Urban Peasants. The first of these more recent works, titled Rubble, served as a decent introduction to the Eternalism technique Jacobs has employed since his earliest foray into digital in 1999. Much like the other 2019 short, Rubble concerns itself with capturing the three-dimensionality of a flat, two-dimensional surface: by alternating rapidly between two similar photographs of the same assortment of rocks, creating the illusion of a stereoscopic diegesis through the perceived distance of both piles. Another example of Jacobs employing this technique on such an elemental level is his recently released (on his Vimeo page, where he regularly posts all of his digital work) Sebastian and Jonas Leaving the Party. The same effect is applied, albeit to a different and far better known “filmic object”: Jonas Mekas—Jacob’s contemporary and long-time friend who died last year—along with his son, Sebastian. While being even shorter than the brief Rubble by about sixty seconds, Sebastian and Jonas Leaving the Party contains a more fundamental understanding of Jacobs’ artistic intentions with his patented technology: that the moments of time most in need of being kept eternal are those that are fleeting, ones that are in danger of being lost in a world of seemingly endless images. The picture of the two Mekas men leaving Jabob’s apartment is in no way exceptional in a compositional sense—it’s taken from behind both of their backs as they walked down the stairs, with Sebastian towering over his father—but it’s the precise nature of this seemingly insignificant photo that imparts a sense of consciousness on to what we look for not just within art, but in history as well. What can photos like these tell us about the emotional devastation of losing a close friend, to want to hold onto this moment forever? Rather ironically, it was Mekas who once called Jacob’s Nervous System Performances (a live-presentation series that was the predecessor to his digital Eternalism technique) a frankensteining of 3-D, as the effect produced suggests a third-dimension more than it conceives of one. Yet, it’s this precise reason that makes Jacobs’ work so invaluable as an educational tool: it’s an implication of a third dimension, not a didactic resolution—in other words, we’re given the tools needed to find this visual and historical depth ourselves.
The second work screened that night was Urban Peasants, which much like Tom, Tom, re-contextualizes found-footage (in this case, home movie recordings from the ‘40s, which were provided by Jacobs’ wife’s aunt) to construct new understandings around the concept of optical perception. It’s also bookended by an unaltered piece of outside media: a recording titled “Instant Yiddish,” which was meant to serve as an instructional guide to learning the traditionally Jewish language. No accompanying visual representation is shown during these lengthy sections, placing a keen emphasis on the artificiality of the recorded conversations. With the support of moving images, these exchanges of language could appear harmonious within the right context; lacking such assistance, their cold, almost inhumane approach towards communal learning tells a different story of cultural assimilation in America, one where learning an unfamiliar language is not choice but requirement. The footage Jacobs has assembled from his extended family is also placed under heavy scrutiny as well, but in a complementary fashion consistent with his aesthetic choices, choosing to both open and close the film with no accompanying audio playing over these home-movies. The family members presented in this section—all working-class, Jewish, and living in the poorest neighborhood in Brooklyn, which is how Jacobs came up for the title of this piece—are seemingly always active: hugging each other, posing for photos, eating dinner together, going to school, or simply existing within their meager realities. With no musical accompaniment to help glamourize their lives as some slumming in a new country parable, Urban Peasants operates as a meditative piece on the construction of history through assumptive judgment. An air of existential dread hangs over the piece, as a basic knowledge of world events informs a reading of the work as something of a Holocaust allegory: these people’s voices are effectively silenced, along with the records of history they’re able to provide, while we’re allowed to bear witness and come to our own conclusions.
This notion of challenging historical narrativization was most manifested with Things to Come, the big advertised event of the night. The short finds Jacobs yet again re-assembling archival footage—in this case, the Swedish documentary New York 1911, which the MoMA restored three years ago—but is in many ways one of the more radical pieces he’s constructed in some time, at least since the overwhelming pixelated-maximalism of Reichstag 9/11 (2016). For starters, the typical epilepsy warning that welcomes viewers into the disorienting possibilities of Eternalism is absent here. Instead, we’re given a warning about the direct violence certain images can cause—in this instance, suggesting that the short will be an aggressive experience that’s different from the neurological affect Jacobs’ work regularly provides. There’s also an explicit amount of digital manipulation that occurs outside of what’s to be expected from the octogenarian’s present-day output, ranging from drawing directly onto the original film itself to utilizing a comic sans-esque typeface to bridge together different segments. Jacobs uses these techniques in this manner to demonstrate the cinema’s ability to construct histories through visual distortion: specifically, by engaging with the crowded city streets of New York City at the beginning of the 20th century with the same wonderment and awe viewers in 1911 would be expected to experience. By imposing Eternalism onto this older media object, Jacob’s allows us to not just witness this history, but feel it on an intrinsically innate level that heightens sensorial awareness; the wonder and awe of the possibility the city can bring, as each added visual element becomes strobed into oblivion. A close companion piece to this would be his 2006 anti-capitalism diptych, comprised of Slavery and Child Labor, which both altered Victorian stereographs into documents of pain and suffering by focusing on the details viewers would ignore by casually scanning at each image—in essence, it’s the audience’s privilege being called out. Child Labor especially addresses this notion by adding a deafening soundtrack consisting of bombastic machinery, not even allowing for casual viewing of this material. For Jacobs, when it comes to certain events from yesteryear, he can become quite direct with his intentionality.
When the moment of “violence” that Jacobs refers to at the beginning of Things to Come finally occurs, there’s nothing quite bellicose about it on a first glance—rather, it builds with hostility the longer one contemplates its objective. After a protracted sequence of a wealthy white family driving their opulent automobile down a busy street (complete with several brief moments of rapidly alternating images, as one would expect), there’s a freeze-frame that calls attention to a small detail most (read: affluent, white cinema-goers) would wish to blatantly ignore when considering its historical situation: that of the black driver, who’s been marginalized to the corners of the frame. This instance is one that’s rooted within Jacobs’ teaching practices, where we first are conditioned to respond to these images in the same way they were originally presented; by now focusing on this driver, we’re suddenly no longer in a position of relaxed engagement. By passively allowing a constructed chronicle of America that ignores its blatantly racist past, we have fallen into a trap of our own entitlement we’ve been confronted by our ignorance to look outside of initial presentation. Much like the imagined three-dimensionality of his aesthetical techniques, Jacob’s criticism of this re-worked history is one that viewers are required to contemplate once the short ends; class is dismissed, and the homework is not allowing oneself to fall for such simple tricks again.
Jacobs closed the night by speaking on the limitless possibilities that digital provides artists (he went as far as to call computers “the greatest invention since humans decided to start walking on their hind legs”), but spoke little about the political dimensions of the program he had just shown. One doesn’t need to sleuth around the internet very long to figure out his political orientation—he has the phrase “looking forward to a world without money” plastered all over his personal webpage—and one can easily come to these conclusions by viewing his work as well (though, what’s being taught on a larger conceptual level far exceeds boundaries relating to an individual temporal sphere). These works speak on specific instances of history, but each operates by a larger guiding principle that pushes past just digging deeper into past events. With the boundless areas of history Jacobs is able to explore with his modernized technology, one can only imagine how he’ll continue to explore and provoke our sense of ocular understanding throughout the next decade. We can only hope he never stops trying to teach us something.