Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1 (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Michael Sicinski

Two feature films and eleven short films, produced between 1955–2021. Produced, directed, photographed, and edited by Ken Jacobs. Blu-ray, color and black and white, sound and silent. Disc one: 202 mins. Disc two: 221 mins. A Kino Lorber release.

Here’s a thought: Ken Jacobs is America’s Godard. Or, if you prefer, Godard is France’s Ken Jacobs. Granted, these are two of the most innovative, iconoclastic men ever to have labored in that realm of the arts we call cinema, and, as such, it’s likely that neither man would especially appreciate such a comparison. Still, I think it is instructive to consider their careers in parallel. Both of them, roughly speaking, has had three distinct periods of creative endeavor, with each subsequent stylistic development containing intellectual traces of the previous one. Both of them eventually arrived at a place of deep wisdom about the nature of the film medium and its connections to social, political, and aesthetic memory. And for both of them, this third phase is less characterized by shooting new film and generating new stories, and more about trawling through the vast accumulation of cultural production—other films, of course, but also painting, poetry, and music—to arrive at a practice that less about personal expression per se, and much more about charting a dialectical materialist history of human perception, our centuries-old processes for making sense of the known universe.

I think the comparison is also valuable because of the radical disparity of attention Godard and Jacobs have received from the larger film world. Even as Godard’s late work becomes increasingly abstract and expansive, as seen in Goodbye to Language (2014) and The Image Book (2018), each new film he issues is regarded as a cultural event, and he is duly feted by such institutions as the Cannes Film Festival and the Centre Pompidou. Jacobs, meanwhile, has arguably entered the most productive phase of his long career, turning out several projects a year at age eighty-eight and showing no signs of slowing down. Alas, Jacobs is aligned with the American avant-garde. In our moment of information overload, cultural institutions and ordinary art lovers seem to cling to categories like life rafts, trying to make sense of it all by sorting and branding. And the American avant-garde, as a latter-day brand, tends to be associated with a recondite, academic seriousness. In other words, Jacobs is perceived as being a “tough” filmmaker, decidedly not for everyone. 

It’s hogwash, really. I would never claim that Jacobs’s art lacks seriousness. He has long been consumed with cinema’s position relative to modernism, and as such his films are deeply committed to disrupting our ordinary perceptual habits. In fact, Jacobs’s explorations into the optical facticity of cinema prompted him not just to make different films but also to invent new ways of making and projecting those films, breaking down traditional “motion pictures” into single-frame microevents, dismantling illusionism and asking the eye to work for meaning. For several decades now, much of his film work has been preoccupied with three-dimensional illusions, the creation of vibrating image-depth through the use of polarizing filters, flicker effects, and our binocular capacity for parallax seeing. Jacobs’s art can genuinely be called “experimental,” in the sense that it is actual optical research.

But an exclusive focus on all of the above—the “seriousness” or “difficulty” of the avant-garde, results in viewers’ inability to see what is right there on the screen in Jacobs’s films. He cares about cinema for the same reasons any of us do. It is a glorious device for activating memory and emotion, for taking us to places we’d never imagined. The thrill of sitting in the dark and being enveloped in new images and sounds—a collective experience that is becoming all too rare—lay at the heart of every Ken Jacobs film, video, or performance. Scholar Tom Gunning (who speaks with Jacobs on a bonus-feature discussion on Disc 1) referred to the “cinema of attractions” as that space of awestruck wonder that is at the very core of cinema. He argued that this wonder characterized the original engagement with early, pre-Griffith cinema, and that it lived on in the avant-garde. That affective jolt is where Jacobs lives as an artist.

Of course, Jacobs literally lives in New York City, and has for his entire life. The first phase of the filmmaker’s career, sometimes called his “Baudelairian” period, is inextricably linked with New York as a place in time. Some of the best known films from this period, such as Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra (both 1963), emerged from the grungy, DIY radicalism of the New American Cinema movement, with Jacobs and his collaborators, Jack Smith and Bob Fleischer, exploring an extemporaneous, low-rent form of moviemaking. As with Smith’s own films, these works display a comically constrained form of melodrama, a queer irony that circles back into childlike sincerity. But what Jacobs brought to this milieu is perhaps most evident in the solo works he produced during this period, from his long-gestating city portrait Orchard Street (1955) through his decades-in-progress feature The Sky Socialist (1963, completed 2019), a film that considers the Brooklyn Bridge as an objective correlative for a freer, more inclusive form of life in New York, a bohemian statement against the rapid solidification of capital and authoritarian control. 

A few years later, Jacobs completed what would become the opening salvo in a years-long interest in the tangible, material “stuff” of film—the frame, the filmstrip, the grain, the camera and the projector, and above all, the spectator. In Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) Jacobs uses the single-reel Edison film of the title, in order to make an action film or sorts, displaying the myriad ways one could watch the original Edison work. Jacobs zooms in on uneventful corners of the frame. He abstracts the projected image until it is little more than swirling grain. He slows the Edison film down, and speeds it up. Eventually, Tom, Tom gives us a look of the actual film zipping through an editing deck, just a blur of upward motion.

In a way, this was Jacobs’s first foray into 3-D, since in many respects he is fighting with the essential flatness of the projected image, trying to penetrate it with a playful but exacting vision. Given the moment of its release, roughly coinciding with Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967), Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, and Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity (both 1970), Tom, Tom came to be seen as a foundational text of “structural film.” This is not an inaccurate characterization, but it is incomplete. Years later, film scholar David E. James compared Tom, Tom with Roland Barthes’s S/Z, a literary “frame analysis” of a Balzac story, and like S/Z, Tom, Tom is suffused with a puckish irreverence that belies any accusations of academic staleness. 

The analytic tinkering at the heart of Tom, Tom opened the door for an entirely new kind of imagemaking for Jacobs, involving the live manipulation of light and film footage, complex projector-performances that largely left behind the idea of a “film” as a single, coherent entity. With his “Nervous System” projects, Jacobs created the 3-D parallax effects right in front of an audience, using two frame-motion projectors and a spinning shutter to provoke depth and movement from otherwise still images. These were major works, but they were obviously difficult to see, given their nonexistence as discrete films. However, with the help of his daughter Nisi, Jacobs used digital tools to create the “Eternalism” process, whereby the toggling between single images and the rapid reversal of positive and negative impressions allowed him to approximate the Nervous System effects within single, bounded, and distributable filmworks.

The Eternalisms comprise the most recent works on the Volume 1 disc. A pair of politically charged films from 2006, Capitalism: Child Labor and Capitalism: Slavery, are based on stereoscope cards, one depicting children in a weaving factory, the other showing slaves picking cotton in a field. By honing in on specific details within the original stereoscope slides, Jacobs both extends and critiques these isolated moments, focusing our attention on individual faces and bodies. In this way, people who were photographed as mere examples of a categorical practice—child labor and slavery—are given new life, brought before our eyes as human beings with irreducible histories and tragic circumstances.

At the same time, Jacobs has employed the Eternalism mode as a means for abstract, formal experimentation. The final film on the disc, Movie That Invites Pausing (2021), is a twenty-minute workout that offers us a moving painting in the idiom of Franz Kline or early Pollock. The electrified brushstrokes induce a restless, pulsating vision of marks on a screen, collapsing in on one another then expanding out again, a form of Abstract Expressionist respiration. As the title tells is, Jacobs has made this work with a cognizance of the twenty-first century’s alternate “theater,” the computer screen and browser window. You can just ride the film out, sometimes losing your way in it, or you can hit pause and examine select moments in the overall process.

Jacobs’s career spans seven decades, and it would be impossible for any two-disc set to provide a complete picture of his achievements. The films on Volume 1, however, offer a fine introduction to the filmmaker’s wide-ranging approaches to artmaking. For those of us more familiar with Jacobs’s work, however, these digital remasters and restorations allow us to revisit classic titles like The Sky Socialist and Tom, Tom with renewed clarity and detail. While some luminaries of experimental film, particularly Snow and Gehr, have avoided distributing their works on home video formats, Jacobs’ embrace of digital technology, and its ever-improving ability to replicate the nuances of celluloid projection, ensures that these works will find the wider viewership they deserve.

Perhaps the best news regarding Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1 is that its title implies at least one more future volume. There are, of course, crucial Jacobs film that are not included in the current release, perhaps most notably his excoriating found-footage epic Star Spangled to Death (begun in 1956, completed in 2004), and his feature film Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World (2006), the work that reflects Jacobs’s firm discovery of how to harness the Nervous System effects using Eternalism. Among his most recent shorter works, Seeking the Monkey King (2011) and Canopy (2014), are especially missed here. Still, the current set is so jam-packed with “attractions” large and small, that it should keep us occupied until Vol. 2 arrives.  

Again, to return to the Godard comparison, while the Nouvelle Vague pioneer moves us horizontally between images, using montage as his primary means of exploration, Jacobs’s analytics are decidedly vertical, taking us inside the image, making a place inside of it for our perception and our thinking. This makes Jacobs’s work utterly inexhaustible, each new viewing an adventure into uncharted territory. In this way, Jacobs’s films truly are eternal. And so, from a certain perspective, Ken Jacobs Collection Vol. 1 is quite literally the only DVD set you’d ever need. 

Michael Sicinski is a writer and teacher based in Houston, Texas, and a Cineaste Contributing Writer.

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