Abstract
In 1969 the American avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs gained wide recognition with a two-hour long interpretation of a 1905 silent short film. Ever since, the artist has kept on revisiting the same material, each time with a different technological approach. Originally hailed as a prime example of structural filmmaking, Jacobs’ more recent variations on the theme of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son beg for a broader understanding of his methods and the meanings implied. To gain a deeper insight in this on-going mise-en-abyme (and an obsession dominating a large part of his career), this essay expands comments by the artist himself with concepts taken from animation, media-archaeology and Warburg’s Mnemosyne atlas. Rereading a filmic text with minute attention, remediating it from an analogue to an electronic format, and reanimating the original action by adding a variety of intervals: all Jacobs’ strategies are aimed at demonstrating the afterlife of Tom Tom in a contemporary cultural context.
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Notes
Ken Jacobs presented his two new variations on the Bitzer original, a year after (and possibly in response to the fact that) his own Tom Tom the Piper’s Son was placed on the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2007. http://www.loc.gov/film/nfr2007.html.
June 19, 1969, Jonas Mekas described in the newspaper Village Voice how Jacobs instigated a new genre: the film translation (Mekas 1972, p. 349).
Full title: Southwark Fair (or The Humours of a Fair) 1733. This engraving was already a remake by Hogarth, literally mirroring the composition of his original painting of the same year.
Sitney identified four formal characteristics common in structural films, but not all four characteristics are necessarily present in any single film: a fixed camera position; the flicker effect; loop printing; rephotography. No reference is made to Ken Jacobs in his article (Sitney 1969).
For an introduction to both approaches, see Elsaesser, Thomas: ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’ (Elsaesser 2004, pp. 75–117).
"Threading through all the ways that it has been theorized over the years—as structural film (Sitney), as poststructuralist film (James), as film and art criticism (Lois Mendelson and Bill Simon), as self conscious excess (Kristin Thompson), as critique of representation (Patricia Mellencamp), and as cinephilic metacriticism (Michelson)—is an acknowledgement of the film’s archeological uncovering of the riotous plenitude of early cinema” (Pierson 2011, p. 15). Many contributions in this first reader on Jacobs focus on Tom Tom. Another main source on the filmmaker is even completely devoted to this title: the 2002 VHS video-release of the film was accompanied by a French book. The conceptual framework here varies from found footage cinema, via semiotics to judaism and beyond. Jacobs himself is also quoted here, explaining: “It is a sociological metaphor about puberty and coming of age, very sexual” (Chodorov ed. 2002, p. 33).
Because the copyright law did not cover motion pictures until 1912, early film producers who desired protection for their work sent paper contact prints of their motion pictures to the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edppr.html, last accessed on 28/08/2015.
Film Culture's publication of this article by P. Adams Sitney appeared in the issue n. 47 (Summer 1969), whereas the première of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son happened earlier that year.
For a historical reconstruction on the introduction of the term, see Wanda Strauven: Introduction to an Attractive Concept in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Wanda Strauven (ed.) Amsterdam University Press, 2006, p. 11. Tom Gunning has repeatedly written on Jacobs and often acknowledged the impact on his thinking.
The term refers to among others Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Ken Jacobs’ films Blonde Cobra (1963) and Baud’larian Capers, at the time typified by Jonas Mekas as: “a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy” (Mekas 1972, p. 85). See also: Rowe, Carel: The Baudelarian cinema. A trend within the American avant–garde. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press 1982.
Smith would appear in several of Jacobs’ films, most notably Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), Star Spangled to Death (1957–2004) and on the soundtrack of Blonde Cobra (1962) In his Return to the Scene of the Crime, Jacobs anachronistically identifies one of the characters from the Bitzer film as Jack Smith.
Hofmann, Hans: “Statement, 1963” reprinted in Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1990) p. 177. “Push and Pull is a colloquial expression applied for movement experienced in nature or created on the picture surface to detect the counterplay of movement in and out of depth. Depth perception in nature and depth creation on the picture-surface is the crucial problem in pictorial creation…”.
“Structuralism” didn’t sound like fun but it had served to catapult me to Professor of Cinema” (Jacobs 2011, p. 14).
“Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son exemplifies my teaching. A film is shown usually without any introduction. Instead of promiscuously going on to the next, we work at it. Finally, it’s shown again straight; there’s now a wild rush of newly familiar subtleties. Students learn what is to know a film” (Jacobs 2011, p. 250).
In 2002 Jacobs released a similar condensation as a poetic riff on the transformation of his film from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process: the autonomously released short film, A Tom Tom Chaser.
“It wasn't until Jonas Mekas presented an Expanded Cinema series in 1965 that I first went public with live performance, predictably an elaborate shadowplay, THE BIG BLACKOUT OF '65: THIRTIES MAN” (Jacobs 2005, pp. 42–43).
“Instructions that travel with the film ask for (1) 20 s of the film-tail to circle flap flap freely before the projector-light is turned off, followed by (2) another 20 s before the projector motor is turned off, and (3) a further 20 seconds before the viewing-room lights are turned up” (Jacobs 2002, p. 17).
Regarding Jacobs underdocumented ‘coinage’ of the term: “Jacobs’ use of the term paracinema needs to be simulteaneously distinguished from, and linked to, the term’s more recent usage. The first recorded instance of the term occurs in a 1974 interview (…) Although the word is not mentioned in the special edition of Film Culture devoted to “Expanded Arts” that followed the 1966 New York “Expanded Cinema Symposium” (43 -Winter 1966), nor in Mekas’ ‘Movie Journal’ colum, nor the Oxford English Dictionary)” (Pierson 2011, p. 21). Meanwhile the term has been reintroduced by among others Jonathan Walley (‘The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema’, in October 103, MIT Press, Spring 2003) and Pavle Levi (Cinema by Other Means, Oxford University Press, New York, 2012).
The original print looks a lot more detailed than in the first Tom Tom translation. In the end titles, Jacobs mentions he was allowed access to a new 35 mm restored print.
In the end titles of Return to the Scene of the Crime, Jacobs thanks besides his collaborators also ‘the work itself for diverting me from the spectacle of our courts and politicians playing dumb while USA descends to Nazi level under Bush-Cheney”.
For a history of this ‘elastic’ term, see: Rees, A. L.: ‘Expanded Cinema and Narrative: a Troubled History’ in Expanded Cinema—Art Performance Film, Rees A.L., White, Duncan, Ball Steven and Curtis David (eds.), Tate publishing, London, 2011.
For a technical description and overview of the two main types of performances Jacobs practiced over long periods (the Nervous System Performances (1975–2000) and the Nervous Magic Lantern Performances (ongoing since 1990), see ‘Annotated Filmography and Performance History’ (Rose 2011, pp. 270–274).
Jacobs’ most radical gesture (and one of the essential titles in the history of found footage cinema) in this sense is his Perfect Film (1965): a discarded TV newscast on the shooting of Malcolm X, presented by Jacobs as unaltered and unedited.
For a detailed explanation: Ken Jacobs, Eternalism: a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimensional motion-direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures, United States Patent 7218339. See: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7218339.html, last visit May 22nd, 2010.
Of direct influence on his investigations (and those of other structuralist filmmakers such as Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad) was the book The Livng Brain by W. Grey Walter, first published in 1953. In some works immediately following Anaglyph Tom, Jacobs also exploits the effect of so-called ‘free view 3D’, requiring cross-eyed viewing, without any spectacles: Berkeley to San Francisco (2009), Brain Operations (2009) and The Near Collision (2010).
Recent instalments include the group exhibitions Aspect Ratio (Rotterdam, 2009), Animism (Antwerp, Bern, 2010) and a solo (Vila do Conde 2010). These remain unmentioned in Rose, William: ‘Annotated Filmography and Performance History’ (Rose, pp. 274–275). In the section on ‘Installations and Other Works’ only two strictly white cube presentations are mentioned. All other (older) enlisted works are either performative (lecture-happenings, audio presentations etc.), or out-door interventions.
The discussion was triggered by a series of articles in Art Forum in 1976 by Brian O’Doherty, reprinted in Brian O’Doherty: Inside the White Cube—The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999.
Michaud uses the pioneers of cinema as a frame of reference, but does not refer to Jacobs in this book. However, he does so explicitly in his following publication Sketches.
The full title of Warburg’s last project: Mnemosyne, Bilderreihe zur Untersuchung der Funktion vorgeprägter antiker Ausdruckswerte bei der Darstellung bewegten Lebens in der Kunst der europäischen Renaissance.
Rose Hobart (1936), an early example of found footage as a visual art practice, is a canonic film by Cornell, to whom Jacobs was acquainted.
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Carels, E. Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative Anamnesis and Autonomous Vision in Ken Jacobs’ Appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son . Found Sci 23, 217–230 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9515-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-016-9515-6