The Lackadaisical Speed of Light

A short by Ken Jacobs. Taormina, Sicily; Mt. Etna erupting nearby.

"2013. USA. Directed by Ken Jacobs. With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs. Part two of four. “Joys…began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening. Since acquiring a small 3-D camera I dawdle everywhere but prolonged bus-waits allow for a continuity of images, thus a movie. Computer-editing with Nisi Jacobs allowed further investigation, this time into digital 3-D itself.” In 3-D. 40 min." – The Museum of Modern Art

The image on the screen flickers unsteadily; the rhythm is unsettling: black/white, black/white, white/black. The film cuts abruptly to a playground. Color appears, sound sets in. Children crawl in the sand, adults watch over them, sitting on benches. It turns abstract. At the end a circle appears on the screen, again flickering strongly, like a beating heart. This is “Incendiary Cinema.” There is no such thing as a nice succession of images; the film is supposed to distress and disturb, and it also aims to create receptivity for images and viewing. It is a small, quite salutary shot before the main film.

Description by Ken Jacobs: Shelley Duvall is Olive Oyl is the fourth in a series of shorts (Popeye Sees 3D; Pappy Sees 3D, Too; Sweepea’s Favorite Eternalisms. We’re crazy about both the original Popeye and the Robert Altman film but the point in evoking the one-eyed sailor was to bring attention to single-eye depth perception. The Eternalism is my name for moving screen-images that not only appear in depth on 2D monitors but can continue in place with no start and no repeat point forever, defying time as we know it but also with their impossible depths available to even a single eye. Time’n’space time’n’space, transformed by cinema! The unthinkable available as the new electronic greeting card.

Description by Ken Jacobs: A Spin Through Night City gets many visual elements spinning. Only daughter Nisi working at our computer knows how difficult it is to get both foreground—rain on the cab window—and background -the city streets—in focus at the same time. The picture we see is deep but the pictorial source remains a single plane.

Here Jacobs revisits the original 1905 source material of his celebrated 1969 structuralist film, Tom Tom the Piper's Son. In his earlier film, a landmark of cinematic deconstruction, Jacobs re-photographed and manipulated a film fragment from the dawn of cinema, penetrating the image to reach the sublime. In Anaglyph Tom, the artist applies the anaglyph 3-D process to the original footage, engaging the experience of depth perception as the subject of his relentless experimentation and dizzying interventions.

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

A Tom Tom Chaser is Jacobs' 2002 poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film Tom Tom the Piper's Son from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

Features two old men talking on the Lower East Side; one loud mouth, the other bizarrely amiable, in 3D.

A study in lunging waves, in 3D.