ActA Univ. SApientiAe, Film And mediA StUdieS, 13 (2016) 73–88
DOI: 10.1515/ausfm-2016-0015
Ken Jacobs and the Perverted Archival Image
Pablo Gonçalo
University of Brasília (Brazil)
E-mail: pablogoncalo@gmail.com
Abstract. This paper analyses two recent works by American ilmmaker Ken
Jacobs that deal with aspects of remediation. The irst is A Tom Tom Chaser, in
which Jacobs records the telecine process that transforms the classic silent ilm
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son from chemical into electronic media. The ilm is
riddled with poetic turns inviting the audience to rediscover the medial noise
hidden by images. Moreover, Jacobs focuses on the moment of transition from
a material medium (the ilm strip) to the immaterial (the image, the video), so
that the noise brings the viewer closer to a perception or brief capture of the
medium in itself. Images are both igured and disigured along this process.
The second work is The Guests, an unconventional 3D ilm in which Jacobs
transforms a short take from a Lumière Brothers ilm by discovering unseen
views of the original footage. In his remediation of the 3D technology, Jacobs
employs the Pulfrich effect, which allows him to blur the images of the archival
ilm and to create instances of uncertainty between the views coming from the
two human eyes. As a result of this procedure, the characters in the ilm seem
to look directly at the audience. The analysis of both ilms highlights the poetry
of the typical manoeuvre by which Jacobs perverts the archival medium,
whereupon the viewing mode between media denaturalizes the usual media
gaze (framed and representational), focusing on the moment of viewing in
itself. This, as a result, favours the medium for what it is and subverts the gaze
that expects something representational, discursive, perhaps story-driven.
Keywords: archival footage, experimental cinema, Ken Jacobs, remediation,
intermediality.
There are artists who can shift back and forth between the two aspects of
archival media: between the body itself and its image, between the moment of
seeing and the point of view it creates. Ken Jacobs is one of the most interesting
cases in terms of such transgressions in perspective. In his book, Breakdowns, Art
Spiegelman depicts Jacobs facing the observer. There is a rectangle cutout placed
against his left eye, suggesting he has a fragmented view of the observer – who also
sees him. From the other side of the gaze, his perspective might be interrupted
and cadenced by the frame of his choice. With this play between pictures and
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subjectivities, Jacobs and Spiegelman offer up a sort of gaze that is anything but
casual. As he puts the autonomous gaze of the depicted character in evidence,
Ken Jacobs not only provocatively inverts (and subverts) the perspectives between
observer and observed, but also hints at ways of denaturalizing the gaze by means
of sensations and perspectives emanating from the characters, the materialities
and immaterialities (the immaterial consisting of a dissolution of would-be
representational imagery). [Fig. 1.]
In a verbal portrayal of his friend (and “vanguard ilmmaker”), Spiegelman
recounts how Jacobs triggered his understanding of paintings as “giant comics
panels” whereupon a larger frame may hint at new, smaller-scale images that often
escape us. Perhaps that is why Jacobs’s picture is fragmented and, interestingly, his
right eye is free of the rectangular frame (or canvas), unlike his left eye. However
subliminally, what this simple picture of Jacobs proposes is a relationship with
the image that both denies and renews one’s gaze and, not by chance, introduces
an interval and an ontological differentiation between the experience of the left
eye and that of the right eye. It generates mediated images that are cutouts rather
than a natural instant or perception, something man-made rather than natural. If
an image can be fabricated by a point of view, then it can also be dismantled.
In the light of the wealth of Ken Jacobs’s experiments with archival images,
this paper aims to propose the paths of perversion of the “archival effect” as a
mode of perception of the alchemy and the unravelling of ontology of the image
woven by the North-American director. I will claim that Jacobs goes beyond
just inaugurating other new devices and cinematographic experiences. He also
dislodges the experience of image off to a different locus, to another percept.
He searches for an experience that lies not in the image, but in the eye; thus, it
happens in between the lapses and peculiar intervals created by his perversion
of the archival image. Why does Jacobs frame what he sees with his left eye in his
portrait? Which image does he want to block? What is the new optical phenomenon
that he wants to intimate? If the image no longer resides in the archival ilm or
another support and not even in proper eyesight, where is it in fact realized?
Jacobs seems to point out the spectral materiality of the gaze itself and its imaging
process, shifting the focus away from a inished image that represents the world
as expected. Even more: amidst the perverting acts performed by Jacobs, what is
the relationship between writing, inscription, montage, image and materiality?
What is peculiar about the gaze on Spiegelman’s frame is that Ken Jacobs’s
starting point is a pre-captured image, a given image, an archival image wrapped
in celluloid ilm (materiality) as embodied forms of perception. It is an archival
Ken Jacobs and the Perverted Archival Image
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image that he must open, manipulate, and pervert. Thus, through his optical
interaction with the archives, Jacobs proposes something that goes beyond resigniication, which has already taken place in the use of the found footage ilms
by means of the so-called archival effect (Baron, 2014).1 He seeks hidden images
and visualizations from among and inside archival media or virtual crystals,
which lourish unexpectedly along the line between material and immaterial,
the gaze and ininite imagination (Marks 2010, 10). The perversion of an archival
image does not initially occur only between media, forms, and remediations, but
it also contaminates gazes, eyes, and materials that were previously regarded
as self-evident and uncontested. Additionally, according to Jacobs, the archival
image does more than presenting the past: it also develops a future or a space for
invention isolated in the gap between the actual medium and its reception by the
brain, that is to say, Jacobs gives back to the viewer an image in media res, in the
process of becoming something that the brain would read as representational or
anecdotic. It is therefore necessary to do a brief review of Jacobs’s work up until
his recent experiments with 3D technology as seen in his ilm entitled The Guests
(Ken Jacobs, 2014), which will be analysed in the inal portion of this article.
1. On Images beyond Memories, Histories and Archives
In 1969, Jacobs screened Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969), a 1905
ilm produced by both Mutoscope and Biograph that he had found and updated.
In an inspired aesthetic turn, he added several new frames as well as decoupage
to the old ilm, changing both its original aspects (such as meaning, narrative and
message) and aesthetic principles.2 This famous found footage ilm inluenced
some remarkable experimental and contemporary ilmmakers such as Michael
Snow and Peter Kubelka, among many others. In addition, Jacobs also approached
1
2
Here we refer most of all to the good work of Baron (2014), who understands the archival and the
entire found footage experience as a form of aesthetic imagination of history. We will argue that
Jacobs’s use of the archival material is closer to an ontological debate not just about the image
but also about sight itself. In my view, the perversion of the archival image happens precisely
in that moment of transition: when an archival image ceases to be strictly historical in order to
become an optical, historical and perceptual aberration.
Since 1961, however, Ken Jacobs has been directly involved with the Anthology Film Archives
group, which gravitates around Jonas Mekas and his circle of friends. He has also been conducting
research, screenings, debates, and experimental ilm productions. The over 30 ilms that Jacobs
has directed can be divided in two different groups. First, there are his experimentations with
archival images, in which he focused on the “cinema of attractions” period of early cinema. The
second group comprises his work with 3D and the so-called Nervous System, which is detailed
on the third part of this article.
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early cinema by going beyond the established interpretation that restricted this
period as pre-narrative (and pre-historical) cinematography. By emphasizing the
visual attractions of ilms like Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969),
Jacobs directly inluenced the academic research of Tom Gunning and Charles
Musser, whose works modernized the interpretation of early cinema.
It is worth noting in the found footage of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, how Ken
Jacobs made small yet notable alterations in the views, the cuts and the highlights
of the myriad images and small frames that make up the long shot of the 1905 ilm.
He not only edits the found archival ilm, but also creates interest by reshooting
it to capture his projections on screen, thus establishing a new meeting point
between the projector and the camera. At the interregnum of this meeting – the
intervals that are so deftly emphasized by the editing, oscillating between stills
and the movement in the archival images (Røssaak, 2011) – Jacobs expressively
handles the archive. Consequently, he yields a presence, not that of the “archival
effect,” but of the materiality (and visuals) of the archival. By putting an emphasis
on the tangible quality of the archival image, and by performing the process or
mechanism of imaging, the ilmic effect folds in on itself neither as image nor as
experience, but as materiality.
Therefore, from early on, Jacobs’s intentions were to awaken real aberrations
within archival images. He duplicates the archival ilm, which gets deliberately
reproduced as a dangerous simulacrum. The images we see in Tom, Tom, the
Piper’s Son are no longer copies nor reproductions of the recorded medium
and the archive of that recording. They are images that call back to a possible
remembrance, something that has dissipated in the process of being disigured
by the adulterated editing, which takes them beyond the archive and intimates
historical and visual transgressions. Those hidden and volatile ghosts are
aberrations that nevertheless create a new mechanism for the archival image,
which, when adulterated, makes up new images in between the shooting and the
projection, leading to new optical discoveries. The poetics and performance of
the archival ilm is a constant and perpetually renewed gesture seen throughout
Jacobs’s work. It can be seen on the threshold of languages and media, along the
border of the gaze that moves between visible forms and mediations (internal and
external) of optical media. This is why Jacobs divides the ilm into three parts:
the full section; then the misconiguration of this, cutting, and fragmentation;
then the perversion and inal presentation of the same section, now with the an
essentially changed image form and visual experience. Jacobs’s poetics of archive
subversion is an optical-material turn.
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The second approach consists of Jacobs’s experiments known as The Nervous
System ilms – again, directly related to archival images. However, Jacobs did
something more radical when he inverted the sense and directions of the archival
frames, thus confronting the audience’s habits of image formation, which might
occur in the gaps between eyes and brain. Ken Jacobs explained the main goal
of those experiments in his Notes on the Nervous System: “[t]he Nervous system
consists, very basically, of two identical prints on two projections capable of singleframes advance and ‘freeze’ [...]. The twin prints plod through the projections,
frame... by frame..., in various degrees of synchronization. Difference makes for
movement and uncanny three-dimensional space illusions via a shuttling mask or
spinning propeller up front, between the projectors, alternating the cast images.”
(Pierson 2011, 16.) [Fig. 2.]
Jacobs’s 2005 ilm, Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly, is
possibly his most famous and descriptive Nervous System experiment. In one of
the irst frames of the ilm, Jacobs shows the wheels of a train spinning in different
rhythms and directions. Sometimes the image bifurcates then fuses two frames
into one. Sometimes the image is paused and the audience hears an astonishing
soundscape, which is also inconstant. Although Ontic Antics is not a 3D ilm, it
was directly inluenced by the 3D principle while in the making. This means that
Jacobs emphasized the intervals between frames, in the cinematographic image,
as well as the lapses between eye perception and the brain registering an image.
In Ontic Antics Jacobs edited the archive of his found footage ilm according to
the rhythm of an old locomotive and, inspired by this cinematographic imagery;
he forced the audience to see something that had not previously been present
(neither perceived nor imagined) in the frames of the archival.
In both his experiments with archival ilms and the central nervous system,
Jacobs establishes a double and paradoxical process that shifts assertively between
archival ilm and the images they convey. On the one hand, he struggles in poetic
agony with the index, as if denying the fact that the index can suggest a single
image of an event. By cutting, tiling, and even hacking the index in the archival
ilms, he rejects the unity of the information and images therein disseminated;3 he
3
My proximity to Jacobs’s archival image perversion and its hacker turn unfolds in a sense
upon how the distortion of a certain “original” ontology ends up generating new possible
and potential worlds. In that sense, it is worth sharing the second paragraph of the hacker
manifesto, which aims to offer an ample perception of that turn: “Whatever code we hack, be
it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we create the
possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but
new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where
data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information
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ends up mistrusting the image he wants to convey with such conidence. In Ontic
Antics, this phenomenon may be noticed as we see two duplicated and divided
images, one on each side of the screen, triggering a fusion and getting mixed with
the images in the center, resulting in a third view. Shattered, broken, the image
there lies not just in the archival footage, and not at all restricted to the right or
left eye, as it cannot even establish unity. The image falls apart entirely. It is recreated in the body, inside the brain; it “happens” – fast and volatile, within the
same temporal lapse that gets “archived” within the body of the spectator. The
image, in this way, is “archived” inside the body as a result of a direct contact of
the ilmic “materiality” with the spectator’s corporeality. This moment leads to
more doubts than certainties. Would it not be a sort of perversion of the image?
On the other hand, along with this mistrust, Jacobs begins seeking hidden
images – virtual but present – condensed among poorly developed nitrate salts;
images that were sometimes randomly captured, yet are still able to resurrect
from the shadows of the archives. This pursuit is permeated by a faith in inding
images, however evasive, temporary, distorted or hallucinated. This is at the
line that separates the index from the event when Jacobs excavates, adulterates
and deprogrammes images. It happens in the intermediate places of perception,
where Jacobs traverses the crystals of time and brings the material up-to-date,
as if poetically touching the fractals of the archives, or the virtuosities of the
image. If, as Laura Marks reminds us, the image establishes a relationship
between information and ininity, then Jacobs annuls the feelings and the senses
of perception and invites the spectator to experience new bendings of space – on
the other side of the archival, and in the perception of images, unusual temporal
twists pointing to the future that take place in the brain of the spectator. As a
result of this manoeuvre, the perception of the archival image as memory or as any
metaphysical redemption of the past is not entirely possible. The archival ilm
and its ontological information from a remote past are torn apart, de-programmed
and, as the index is not persistent, one may go on to view something beyond the
index or its materiality, something that can only be concocted in the brain in
reaction to the subversion of imaging expectations. The peculiarity lies in the fact
that those volatile, aberrant images are nevertheless material.
new possibilities for the world are produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the
old. While hackers create these new worlds, we do not possess them. That which we create is
mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who control the
means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce – it owns us.”
(Wark 2004, 002.)
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Jacobs provokingly throws us into another environment in order to help us
go beyond an understanding of the archive restricted to testimony, as addressed
by, for example, Agamben (1998) or Sarlo (2007). The audiovisual shimmer in
this new cut points to what is to come, and in the wake of Derrida’s archival
fever, the archival generates its own deviations, speculums, and speculative
aberrations about what is beyond the index and the aura of the occurrence. For
Jacobs, the archival is above all multiple, multifaceted, and malleable – an optical
phenomenon that takes us to other spatial-temporal spirals.
Like a hacker immersed in analogue media, Jacobs disrespects the archons
of audiovisual archival ilms. Archons are understood, according to Derrida,
as the power of constriction that makes archives possible – the preconceived,
patriarchal, and authoritarian ideas that engender secondary, derived, and
preformatted concepts and perceptions. To Jacobs, this power is above all optical:
technological standards that invent (and restrict) the technical possibilities
found in the act of perception and observation. Therefore, Ken Jacobs perverts
the optical archons and their data – the moulds of perception – along with the
technical-sensorial conigurations that make the audiovisual gaze possible as
well as historically or technologically restricted. Yet, what does it mean to say
that Jacobs perverts archival images?
To be more speciic, perversion reappears as a poetic mode in Jacobs’s more
recent ilms such as The Guests. In any case, what we suggest as a “poetics of
perversion” consists of a subversion of an original grammar and meaning, which,
concerning the archival images and their “effect” (cf. Baron 2014), approaches
a redemption of a past long gone and therefore metaphysical. On the one hand,
Jacobs challenges the spectators to see, in the act of re-watching an archival ilm, an
inapprehensible past in relation to the past itself that the archival ilm attempted
to record. On the other hand, the archival image itself is viewed directly in its
materiality. There is no more past, or an act of temporal differentiation from a
present gaze that updates the archival, but an ebullience of the crystals of the past
that generate images of an offbeat future. This is the essence of the perversion of
the archival. By being perverted, the archival itself bifurcates and makes possible
mediations of perspective between the distinct natures of the image, between the
gaze of the observer and the singular feeling by the observer of also being gazed
upon (Castro, 2002).
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2. A Tom Tom Chaser and Some Archival Boundaries
Jacobs qualiied A Tom Tom Chaser (Ken Jacobs, 2002) as a scanning improvisation.
In an extremely simple manner, the ilm uses the archive of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s
Son and follows its telecine process of transferring the “original” chemical
material to an electronic image. Using a similar aesthetic principle, Jacobs
also reframes the original takes of the Mutoscope and Biography ilm archive.
However, in A Tom Tom Chaser the image blur is much stronger and takes center
stage. [Fig. 3.]
By emphasizing its process of material and mediatic transformation, Jacobs
refrained from assigning a locus for the archival. Thus, he uses the transformation
of the archival image to invite the audience to invent their gaze. The material is
neither an original archive nor a future archive in the process of becoming. It is
only a simple and displaced archival image. Peculiarly enough, the gaze of the
audience has no other possibility: it must occur in between medias, within a
certain boundary, and without speciic media (or form) conigurations. [Fig. 4.]
Wittily edited, A Tom Tom Chaser creates fast aesthetic perceptions that
sometimes impose a speciic medium upon the audience; thereafter it casts the
same image into another media materiality and then alternates the perception
of the image between different frames. This reframing occurs in between media,
consequently blurring the image. On top of that, the eye rarely has enough time to
reframe between these media. This means that the eyes need more time to capture,
focus, and see (or believe they are seeing) an image beyond media and materiality.
Directly or indirectly, the dynamics created by Jacobs interact with the
remediation concept elaborated by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, who
state that remediation is a transference and refashioning of the content from
one medium (and the perception of the medium) to the coniguration of another
medium. However, remediation might happen in two different instances and in
aesthetic or technological turns. The irst is known as immediacy, which creates a
irst person point of view and a virtual reality effect. In visual media, immediacy
puts viewers through an immersive experience in which seeing simulates a sense
of reality. In their genealogy of immediacy, Bolter and Grusin refer back to the
Renaissance perspective when viewers saw through the image and had a feeling
of believing what they saw. Thus, immediacy constructs a natural sensation and
an “unmediated presentation.”
On the other hand, hypermediacy is a construct that presents viewers with
the perception of the media coniguration itself. It means that the viewer can
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simultaneously observe the representation as well as the media used to enact
this representation. Thus, hypermediacy lirts constantly with fragmentation,
heterogeneous media, interruptions, and indeterminacy. “In all its various
forms, the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a
visual space as mediated and as ‘real’ space that lies beyond mediation” (Bolter
and Grusin 1999, 41).
Jacobs’s remediations in A Tom Tom Chaser (as well as in most of his works)
have a more precise dialogue with the hypermediacy tradition. However, for very
brief moments, Jacobs invites viewers to believe in what is known as the archival
effect, which is a sense of past and reality while casting the gaze upon the
frame. The Tom Tom archival image oscillates between chemical and electronic
perception, and Jacobs inserts both remediation and hypermediacy between
media. In a provocative manner, Jacobs asks the audience to at once believe and
doubt what they are seeing.
Where the scanning process erases traces of remediation in a digital age, Ken
Jacobs does the exact opposite. In between archival images (and hypermediacy),
A Tom Tom Chaser offers precisely a scanning-image. When an image is liberated
from its material support, it occurs only inside the brain in a delay, as an illusion.
However, and paradoxically, it is precisely when the image, during the interval of
its remediation, becomes ethereal that it reaches the viewer, gets embodied and
becomes an archival image. Jacobs offers both a meeting and a mismatching of the
material and the viewer’s body; and the material consists of matter in its fault, its
ephemeral and fully realized blank, matter before matter, matter before memory.
Without speciic materiality, the image is restricted to a phantom, or a simulacrum
that almost becomes an autonomous igure. Again, that is why it is a perverting
act, since the image for Jacobs is always essential and extremely material yet never
ceasing to be imaginative in an offbeat, unpredictable and unsettling way.
3. The Guests: Perspectivism, Paces and Paths of
Figures
Finally, what would this material and poetic perversion insistently woven by
Jacobs be? By exploring the transition and the buffer zones between different media
and materialities, Jacobs ends up intertwining images of different nature, which
approaches something that can be described with the concept of multinaturalism,
used by Viveiros de Castro (2002, 377), in the ield of anthropology. (This refers to
the belief that lies at the core of the mythologies and cosmologies of indigenous
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American cultures, namely that that animals are former humans. We are, of
course, only borrowing this anthropological concept; nevertheless, it allows us to
enlighten some of the phenomena of perspectivism. Jacobs is frequently referred
to as an alchemist; and we hereby stress his shamanic side in order to outline
distinct imagistic perspectives that are completely isolated from one another.
And that is where the discussion encounters the debates about an ontology
– anthropological and imagistic – that favours incompleteness, intervals and
inconstancies between modes of perception over a properly rounded, deined
form with a single framing. The perversion would occur during that passage
between opposite perspectives. When animals cease to be human, and when
humans, by means of their shamanic rites, abandon their bodies to tour animal
cosmologies, a twist of perspective occurs which creates the opportunity to
reconsider the world. Perversion, on the other hand, and in Jacobs’s poetics,
happens during the process of the sensible transiguration of matters which get
dematerialized, which abandon their original bodies in order to, deprived of
bodies, like animistic entities, create a visual vertigo that approaches aberration,
leading to something inaccessible, almost forbidden. Perversion would be the
poetic act of traversing, of passage, by which the viewer would gain access to a
sort of impossible nature, an entirely other language, which, much like an Eden,
has no more ontological possibility of interacting, imagining or even seeing. And
that is the kind of perversion – since perspectivism would be essentially heretical
– that we see in most of Jacobs’s ilms and archival experiments.
Recently released in the festival circuit only, The Guests is one of Ken Jacobs’s
latest ilms and it is directly screened in 3D technology. This is the irst time he
uses a 3D camera and 3D glasses in his work. However, as stated earlier, Ken
Jacobs has been experimenting with 3D concepts since the 1970s, his Nervous
System ilms can be seen as an intimate continuity between both moments.
As in his other works, Jacobs uses an archival and a found-footage chemicalbased ilm as a starting point for The Guests. The original Lumière ilm is only
a few minutes long and merely registers the arrival of guests at the wedding
reception of the Lumières’ sister. It is a little-known ilm by the Lumière brothers
and it has a peculiarity that is widely explored in the framing: guests appear lined
up before the Lumières’ camera and speed up, almost one by one, in a sequence
that allows for the exploration of a peculiar depth-of-ield. The irst perversion
Jacobs does in the Lumière ilm is the radical extension of cinematic timing using
slow motion to extend second-long frames into minutes. By alternating rhythm
and movement, Jacobs transformed the few minutes of the Lumières’ ilm into a
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90-minute experience. This radical extension dilates the presence of the igures,
of the guests, who walk step-by-step, frame-by-frame, through the Lumières’s
camera and the 3D glasses. [Fig. 5.]
The second perversion is directly related to the Pulfrich effect, which, as
Ken Jacobs once afirmed, is one of the key concepts that inluenced his 3D
experiments. The Pulfrich effect occurs when the two eyes send image signals
to the brain in different time frames. The gap in this case is totally different from
retinal persistence due to which the internal movement of the cinematographic
apparatus and frame opens and creates an illusionary image. The gap of the
Pulfrich effect occurs very subtly in and between the two eyes and the brain.
It creates a delay in the picture and small differences in light, thus inserting
a pendulum or time lapse between the eyes and the brain, which extends the
duration of perception from one image to another. The odd thing is that the
Pulfrich effect has often been used to create the three dimensional effect. In
The Guests, Ken Jacobs does the opposite: he uses 3D glasses and employs the
Pulfrich effect to provoke distrust in the act of seeing; he blurs the view and
creates a misty three-dimensional environment. By this, the 3D becomes opaque.
Consequently, the imagistic pendulum woven by Ken Jacobs establishes a spatial
disparity in moving objects. Therefore, The Guests is a ilm in which space is
not a projection, but an invasion. It is exactly in that aspect of invasion that the
multinaturalism of image – between different materials and temporalities – gets
transigured into perspectivism. Instead of just seeing, as the usual projection
of Renaissance perspective, the viewer goes on to feel observed, seen, followed
by the gaze of those objects, those sculptures marching in a slow and precise
movement toward the other side of the frame, of the ield, of the shot and the
traditional cinematic space.
Ken Jacobs combines the length of an archival footage with the Pulfrich effect
and, little by little, adds 3D. Thus, he perverts the so-called archival effect and
does something more radical than remediation. Just like in Adieu au Langage
(Godard, 2014), Godard’s latest ilm, one can notice in Jacob’s work a hypermediacy
experiment with 3D. In this, an opaque 3D phenomenon “happens” in between the
eyes and the brain and produces a strange feeling when using the 3D apparatus,
which is itself perceived and experimented by the audience. However, The
Guests gradually becomes a ilm of effects that hints at counter effects. It is as if
it played against its own device: it starts with the 3D, showing unusual or nearly
invisible frameworks and frame details. By this, the Lumières’s ilm refers back to
the brushstrokes of an impressionist painting (echoing Godard, who once called
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the Lumière brothers the last impressionists). The audience begins to perceive
faces, tiny details, delicate gestures and unusual movements or image-times. In
this ilm, Jacobs creates a 3D experience similar to kinetic art and uses a play of
colors and depths that reminds us of a Mondrian painting. We are looking at art
that highlights surfaces.
It is as if the ghost-like imagery recorded by the Lumière brothers had sprouted
volume, shape, and forms that, once alive, presented autonomous effects. This
is a sculptural ilm. Gradually, between one pendulum and another, between
the ontological and vertigo images, there is the feeling that the audience is not
composed of viewers watching ghosts, but rather the exact opposite. The viewers
are being seen and observed from the other side of the crystal-images. This spatial
disparity of The Guests makes possible the survival of the images (Nachleben),
as Aby Warburg described it (Didi-Huberman 2002). However, Jacobs still
debates a cinema that abolishes the dynamics of Renaissance perspective and
reveals a form of sensitive image organization that denies the original projection
or point of escape. Ken Jacobs eventually creates issures in the ontology of
media ilming within the Lumières’s archive, and perverts it. His version is the
opposite of archeology; it is nostalgia and it is what has been called the archival
effect, because he points to the future, to images that demand to be created.
The remediation instant in The Guests can be considered an almost impossible
dismediation of the archive. It is a heretical act that goes beyond aesthetics. It is a
form of salutary disrespect toward time and the movements inscribed inside the
archival material. Finally, when this unprecedented experience ends, we toast to
the vitality of our retinas while, distant and guarded, Ken Jacobs greets us with
this unique visual heresy.
In bringing this article to a close, I would like to comment on a last picture in
which Ken Jacobs inserts his own image into the archival footage, and appears
as an audiovisual igure. In As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief
Glimpses of Beauty (Mekas, 2000), Jonas Mekas shows and comments on an
archival recording from the 1970s at his house. There are intimate and festive
moments that celebrate the delicate quality of a daily life that is easygoing,
pleasurable and grounded. Mekas, surrounded by friends in his apartment, tells
them about a time when Jacobs, Bible in hand, read, commented and talked about
one of its passages. The scene has no sound and, even as an archive or index of
this occurrence, the audience can only speculate as to what Jacobs said. Even
so, the scene is truly revealing. Jacobs, Mekas and Spiegelman all have Jewish
origins and seem to intentionally play with images, memories and archival ilm
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in a playful effort to bring back to life something that already happened – from
the index to real imagination, something already given, inscribed and archived in
this great support that we can, somewhat mystically, call world.
However, Jacobs’s Jewish turn leads back to a play of gazes, images and
igurations that is deeply rooted in the prohibition of idols in that religion. By
referring back to an image that is not there, evident and stark, in the archival ilm,
Jacobs turns to a way of seeing that seeks to transpose the veil of image itself and
intimates a non-igurative vision, truly different from the Christian, metaphysical
idealization. As Mondazain very deftly stressed, the veil of image is, for the Jewish
Torah tradition, an evident materiality, a stance of the literal, “a pure screen of
the legible that cannot, in any shape or form, be in the sphere of inscription of the
visible” (Mondazain 2003, 42). It is the invisible visible, beyond igurative image
that this way of seeing, deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, ends up establishing.
In that vein, we can say that at the core of the archival perversion, in Jacobs’s
works, lies an eagerness of surpassing a particular way of seeing the archival
that is essentially igurative and metaphysical. The perverting act lirts with the
prohibition of the idol image by Judaism as much as with a turn, a different way
of seeing that seeks, aesthetically and poetically, to enliven the invisible that lies
beyond the image.
If everything is written, then a certain original aura can be awakened, if only
to get in touch with the archives of the world. In this way of thinking, writing
is less about inventing something new than about rewriting (or reviewing) what
has already been written, stored and inscribed. It is within this fairly religious
environment that Ken Jacobs’s archival ilm subversions persist in implementing
the act of seeing beyond the image – in transcending its sacredness – and beyond
its physical, material and media support. These are profane gestures that embody
an ethical presence. If the audiovisual archive creates a world that has already
been given to the viewer, then Ken Jacobs seeks to see through it and reveal what
escaped and did not get stored. It is as if, from the creation of the world, we
pass through cinematographic imaging to the fundamental, silent and unmoving
igures inside, and that little by little we are accompanied by their ghosts until, in
a psychotic schizophrenia of images, they begin acquiring optical and sculptural
autonomy. The summary of Ken Jacobs’s poetic perversions unfolds in an
audiovisual world created by the very creatures that inhabit the archival media
where the igures are no longer passive, but control the previously autonomous
gaze of the viewer. They are igure-guides that lead us to a world which, indeed,
we can see (and read), but can never inhabit. The paradoxical effect of those
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imagistic experiences lies in their power and reveals itself in the vertiginous
instances and hallucinations that come from poetically giving up control of our
gaze. At the end of each session, such images indelibly inhabit our memory. This
is the heretical pleasure of an optical heresy that the perversion of archival ilm
offers to its spectators.
References
Agamben, Giorgio, 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereing Power and Bare Life. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press.
Baron, Jaimie, 2014. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual
Experience of History. New York: Routledge.
Belisle, Brooke, 2014. Depth Readings: Ken Jacobs’s Digital, Stereographic Films.
Cinema Journal vol. 53, no. 2 (Winter): 1–26.
Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New
Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de. 2002. A inconstância da alma selvage [The
Inconstancy of the Indian Soul]. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify.
Derrida, Jacques, 1995. Mal d’archive: une impression freudienne [Archive Fever:
A Freudian Impression]. Paris: Gailée.
Didi-Hubermann, Georges, 2002. L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art e temps
de fantômes selon Aby Warburg [The Surviving Image: History of Art and
Phantoms of Time According to Aby Warburg]. Paris: Minuit.
Gunning, Tom, 1989. Films that Tell Time: the Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken
Jacobs. In Film that Tell Time: a Ken Jacobs Retrospective, ed. David Schwartz,
3–11. New York: American Museum of Moving Image.
Marks, Laura. 2010. Enfoldment and Ininity: an Islamic Genealogy of New Media
Art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Mondazain, Marie-José. 2003. Le commerce des regards [The Trade of Looks].
Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Pierson, Michele. 2011. Ken Jacobs – a Half Century of Cinema. In Optic Antics:
the Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds. Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul
Arthur, 3–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Røssask, Eivind. 2011. Acts of Delay: The Play between Stilness and Motion in
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s son. In Optic Antics: the Cinema of Ken Jacobs, eds.
Michele Pierson, David E. James and Paul Arthur, 96–107. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. 2007. Tempo Passado: cultura da memória e guinada subjetiva
[Time Past: Culture of Memory and Subjective Turn]. São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras.
Spiegelman, Art. 2008. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! New
York: Pantheon.
Wark, McKenzie 2004. A Hacker Manifest. Cambridge, Massachusetts and
London: Harvard University Press.
List of Figures
Figure 1. Ken Jacobs in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@?*! by
Art Spiegelman. Figure 2. Ken Jacobs: Optic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy:
Bye, Molly (2005).
Figures 3–4. Ken Jacobs: A Tom Tom Chaser (2002).
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Figure 5. Ken Jacobs: The Guests (2014).