Whims of 2023: Ken Jacobs' Up the Illusion
Francisco Rojas • 21.07.2024
Sky Socialist (1968)
A little over a year ago, on April 15, it was the opening night of ''Up the Illusion'', a “retrospective” of Ken Jacobs' work in celebration of his 90th birthday at the 80 Washington Square East Gallery. “Retrospective” in quotes because the selection, curated by Andew Lampert, while including plenty of classics and films from the early periods of Jacobs’ filmography, was heavy in his work made during the past five years. Having said that, it’s hard to argue against Lampert's decision considering that we’re talking about Jacobs' most prolific period, which is saying a lot for a filmmaker who saw his quota of films increase exponentially at the turn of the 21st century, after going from film to digital. If we take Orchard Street (1955) as the starting point of this retrospective -and also of Jacobs career-, it’s a retrospective of 58 years to the present. From a total of 65 films included in the retrospective, 53 films were made in the last 20 years.
In an interview with R. Emmet Sweeney, Jacobs mentioned that when he was young and “hitchhiking across the country, sometimes someone would offer me a sandwich. That 's how young artists were expected to live (...)”. He also mentions working as a window washer and living in poverty. But even in those conditions he was as restless as he is today, or at least, as restless as his current work makes him seem. In the same interview he mentions meeting the painter Hans Hoffman, which not only was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism, but was also Ken Jacobs’ teacher; Jacobs has mentionedHoffman’s influence in his artistic life on more than one occasion, especially his interest in depth: “In 1965 I met Hoffmann in the park near NYU. He asked what I’m doing, and I described miserable poverty. But I also told him I’m working a lot in film, when I could afford a roll of film, I shoot it, you know? And he says, “Ah, when you’re young, you can do anything.” Sixty years later, Up the Illusion serves as a testament to the incombustible imagination and energy of one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers -or “filmmakers'', plain and simple- in history.
The cinema of Ken Jacobs, like that of Ernie Gehr (more on that next month), is indivisible from the streetscape. There is a horizontality and a unity between the reality being captured on camera and the illusion that follows it, between the eye dealing with its surroundings and the work that will come out of the act itself. That’s why the 80WSE gallery at which the films were presented was such a fitting place to host them, with the screens facing outside the building, towards the streets, the films illuminating New York at night, the films were returning to their place of origin.
Despite the fact that organising a comprehensive exhibition for an artist with more than 200 films under his belt is a challenge, it has to be said that the 65 films that make up the retrospective include most of Jacob’s greatest and most important works. Although some works such as Blonde Cobra (1963) and Little Stabs at Happiness (1960) are missing from his early period, one could argue their absence comes from a decision to have films that deal more with Jacobs’ “eye”. Jack Smith gets to have the spotlight with Two Wrenching Departures (2006), while Jerry Sims gets to join the exhibition with Jerry Takes Backseat, then Passes Out of the Picture (1987); both films are a way for Jacobs to say goodbye to his friends, but also a conscious effort to make them part of his natural and creative life. They are now a part of his filmography and therefore, they are immortal. Perfect Film (1986) is another one of his notorious films that isn’t a part of the retrospective, in it Jacobs does some detective work and puts together unused raw footage from a TV newscast reporting the assassination of Malcolm X. For Jacobs, this film was a way of giving the viewer the power to “to put in time exploring (the territory), roughing it (on their own)”, without editing pointing them to a specific direction, determining what should be seen and what stays in the shadows. That freedom, that agency that Jacobs gives to the viewer isn’t just a visual tool but a political one. These energies are present in all the 65 films programmed.
Celestial Subway Lines Salvaging Noise (2005)
Chronometer and Celestial Subway Lines Salvaging Noise, for example, are some of his most important films from his middle period, between the 1990s and 2000s, both of which are “results” of the Jacobs’ (Ken and his wife Flo) Nervous Magic Lantern performances, instances that could be labelled as “expanded cinema”. One could argue that those performances are what shaped Ken Jacobs' vision for the 21st century and that there are a handful of films that also were born out of materials from such activities. His work in 3D is also missing from the retrospective. Although they are logistically impossible to be shown “publicly”, we could argue that his technique, the Eternalism (patented by Jacobs itself, we can still invent new ways of making cinema!), which dominates most of his later work, is a simple yet powerful way to play with a two dimensional image and give it the illusion of three dimensional perception without the need of glasses, even without the need of having a pair of working eyes. One is enough to enjoy the magic. The other major omission might be his greatest -at least in terms of size- film, Star Spangled to Death (2004), a sort of elliptical chronicle running for 6 and a half hours dealing with the end of the United States, if such a thing even existed in the first place. There's materials ranging from portraiture to playful exercises with Jerry Sims and Jack Smith and a long parade of institutional films, with Jacobs intervening with texts and even proposing breaks from time to time. Its running time might be prohibitive for some, nevertheless Jacobs has made the film completely available on his Vimeo page, with almost 300 other pieces.
All of this considered, it makes a lot of sense that -besides the exhibition extending for a good 7 months, giving all the films a very generous temporal space- the gallery also had the entire exhibition happen online through on website 80wse.org, not only by exhibiting the films, but also Jacobs’ drawings, some of which were being made available for the first time ever. And all of this happening during the same 7 month period of the physical exhibition, and to be perfectly honest, probably for a little longer.
Many of Jacobs’ famous films come from the 60’s, some of them being his most essential works. The Winter Footage (1964 - 1984) finds him working in something of a diary-film type of work, filming the light entering from his window, making playful portraits with friends, following their steps on the pavement, changing camera movements, looking for angles within the frame, trying to break the bi-dimensional images. In 1964, Ken Jacobs was already chasing for a new way of perception. Materials from the same period make The Sky Socialist (1968), maybe his first masterpiece. Although the film went through several revisions and versions for almost 50 years; here the visual playground works within a free narrative where the Holocaust was only a bad dream, while New York appears as a character in itself, already in a state of “reconstruction”, almost as if the locations were part of an Italian neorealist film. The poorer neighbourhoods disappear, being destroyed, getting torn down and replaced for new structures; the first steps to becoming the gentrified United States that we now know. In a way The Sky Socialist invokes in real time what Jacobs exhibits in Star Spangled to Death. We’re seeing the exact moments the foundations are starting to crumble.
Tom Tom The Piper’s Son (1969) was, for many years, Ken Jacobs’ most famous movie and it's the film that sets the stage for most of his subsequent work. A short film by Billy Bitzer serves as the starting point for Jacobs, almost using the original piece as a sandbox to play in. He stops at little details, plays with time, movement and speed. Sometimes he sets the film aside and captures images from his window for a few seconds, only to return to the original canvas. It is a meticulous study of every movement within Bitzer’s piece, as if Ken is unearthing a fossil, a pure act of archeology; but at the same time, it is a reflection of the elements that drive Jacob’s enthusiasm: the manifestation of movement, being aware of the visual changes surrounding that movement, as if he’s reconfiguring the world with the delicate movement of a magic wand; cinema. After a running time of almost two hours, before Ken reclaims the original piece as his, he lets the initial film play in full, just like at the start. Only then we realize how different the “world” was before it changed, only then we realize that despite all of those changes, we still recognize the world in the same way.
Before we enter into the nineties, lets take a look at his other two films that return to Jacobs' diary filmmaking; Nissan Ariana Window (1969) and Binghamton, My India (1970) are some of the exhibition’s (and probably Jacob’s filmography) most pictorial films with carefully composed, fixed camera shots, with lighting reminiscent of a Baroque or landscape painting; but seeing the light on the concrete after the rain is enough for Jacobs to just grab the camera and play with the light and contrast. Movement is the central character again, he 's not worried about stylistic unity. He just goes out and plays.
The nineties are represented by only two films, but one of these two may be the most important of all, so much so that in the online exhibition, this film is the one that closes the retrospective. If we construct a timeline with all 65 films in the exhibition, Flo Rounds a Corner (1999) could be considered a “threshold crossing”, the transition from celluloid to digital. It is a very brief film in which Flo Jacobs is walking a street in Sicily while Ken Jacobs follows here with his camera. Throughout its 6 minute running time, Ken plays with perspectives, repeating frames and cutting to black creating a flicker-like effect, but also jump cutting directly to other images from the same shot. The background separating itself from the subject as if they are parts of a different puzzle, the entire frame moving as a living and breathing entity. Ken Jacobs would keep working on a similar fashion for the next 25 years and counting. The resulting technique became what we now call “Eternalism”.
Star Spangled to Death (2004)
Thom Andersen said that with digital, avant-garde filmmakers are more prolific than ever, but the films themselves lack rigor and are not on the same level of their analog work. Ken Jacobs, however, has more than a few masterpieces working with the digital medium. Granted, in the case of Star Spangled to Death we’re talking about an expansive film, and sometimes cinephiles tend to overvalue movies for their length rather than on what’s really in them, treating them more as curiosities than as sincere forms of expression and that would be the wrong way of dealing with his work: most of Ken Jacobs' best films could be considered brief, they reflect the constant state of stimulation and exhilaration, as if they could be strokes of genius, spurts of creativity; but then again, the same happens with digital, especially within the avant-garde; digital filmmaking seems to be disregarded as anti-artistic, as if the concept of films was only attached to the format and not the the discipline itself. Jacobs’ digital work is a testament to the way simple gestures of the camera can create a physical, even emotional effect, they get engraved in our conscience. Jacobs became a diary filmmaker, but not in a conventional sense. The ordinary became a permanent catalyst for his imagination.
In the 2000s we have some of Ken’s most popular films; for example, his literal moving-pictures with the Capitalism series and The Surging Sea of Humanity (2007). The Capitalism-films are a way to make a historical photograph -a literal piece of history- come alive and to make it part of the present, the image a manifestation of history as things that really happened, even when we weren’t there to see them directly. On the other hand The Surging Sea of Humanity submerges the viewer into a crowd that seems to be looking us straight in the eye, the photograph becoming a space in which our gaze can live. Once again, Jacobs shows the original picture by the end of the film, with the object/subject that made the entire piece possible. That decision to me always felt as if a magician was revealing the magic trick, and I mean this affectionately. Knowing how he made it, or where the “trick” came from doesn’t harm the illusion, he’s not ruining the magic trick. The beauty lies in its simplicity, and the humility in the artist letting us take a look behind the curtain.
By the end of the decade, Jacobs was already looking back. In films like Hot Dogs at the Met (2008) or The Day was a Scorcher (2009) he uses old pictures and photographs from his travels or family activities to open the door again into his personal life, showing us his family and friends. These films don’t have verbose ruminations like Jonas Mekas' (to which he dedicates a similar kind of film in Kodachrome Days) but Jacobs in his own way reaches the same emotional conclusion. He is treasuring those moments because the past just gets away before we can ever consider it in the present.
Perhaps Jacobs doesn’t have the reputation of an abstract filmmaker that some of his contemporaries have attached to their names, but there are more than a few films here representing his best qualities as a non representational image maker, most of them, naturally, involving the ever changing surface of the sea. Highlights include The Green Wave (2011), Turbulent Waters (2011) (a longer version of the materials that made Bi-Temporal Vision: The Sea, filmed by Phil Solomon) and The Scenic Route (2008). The latter film in particular works on a similar principle to The Surging Sea of Humanity, creating a vortex of liquid textures out of old photographs from a beach, some of those textures with a detail so pristine that they seem impossible to be captured by any other artist. There’s also Gravity is Tops (2009), a simple exercise on which images from sea waves get duplicated, superimposing them, then changing their direction, extending the canvas, letting the mechanism of the Eternalisms be visible. If the Eternalisms consists in creating depth out of flat, bidimensional images, here Jacobs reveals the craftsmanship involved to create that illusion, and the results remain as stimulating as when we didn’t know the technique at all.
Star Spangled to Death might be an absence here, but there are more than a few glimpses of Jacobs at his most furious. Another Occupation (2011) and Seeking the Monkey King (2011) are sister films and have the powers that be at their center. Ken Jacobs lived to see the United States participating in many wars, occupying foreign territories, dictating the destiny of other nations. Any political or economical interest served as an excuse to invade and make a profit out of other people’s suffering. We’re talking about very angry films, and that’s what makes them special, the sincerity with which Jacobs lashes out to a nation that has disappointed him over and over again throughout his life. One of the most notable moments in Seeking The Monkey King is when a text reads: “America is a fiction. A work of art, or at the very least a feat of cleverness. It is an enlarged and empty Brillo box traded back and forth for millions thanks to Our Prince Of Fakery.” He’s not only making his political convictions crystal clear, he also doesn’t waste the chance to also share his artistic convictions also, sharing his known disgust at Andy Warhol and Art Pop in general. In another interview he said about that specific art movement: “I can't imagine Pop Art that isn't dumb, that isn't shallow crap.”
After these two films the use of text and titles becomes more frequent; sometimes they are memories, sometimes they are used for context, or Jacobs shares synopses of other films, then again using a film by another artist as a basis for an idea to develop it (as in his film Failure). Sometimes they are just thoughts, as if they were part of the same thought process of capturing the images, even when the visual and the written word seems to have no relation at all. Of course, it is Jacobs himself who acts as the real unifying axis. He can take refuge in the beauty of the sea in The Moments: Evening Boat Ride (2018), but he never stops protesting against the state of his country, against what he sees as an insult to the very world he is exploring visually. Jacobs only uses words when the images might fall a bit short of the moment he is trying to convey, of the things he’s trying to say. He is always thinking, he refuses to let his mind rest.
Lazy City (Eternalism Series)
Out of the 65 works presented in the retrospective, 32 of them were finished during the last 5 years. The best of these is without a doubt 2019's Nervous Magic Lantern: 3D for One or Two Naked Eyes; a year later, a subtly reworked version was released as the film we now know as Movie That Invites Pausing (2020). Just like some of the other highlights of the retrospective -Chaos is Order Misunderstood (2019) and A Small Misunderstanding (2021), for example, two films that immerse the viewer into a world of tiny particles, a gift of microscopic vision for 60 or 7 minutes depending on which of the two films we’re watching- the film was born out of the Nervous Magic Lantern performances, like the title itself indicates. 3D for One or Two Naked Eyes (2019) shows a play of patterns and textures, of liquid movement and contrast that is impossible to put into words. To do it is an insult to the experience itself. When Jacobs released Movie That Invites Pausing he had amassed a very loyal following on social media, sharing some of his eternalisms every now and then. Despite his very direct and honest online presence, one wouldn’t be wrong in being fearful that some people might engage with these pieces as mere curiosities, as just another post in the twitter feed. A correction was soon to come and it was definitely an unexpected one: with the pandemic and the necessity of screening films digitally via streaming, Screenslate presented two Ken Jacobs films via streaming-platform Twitch; Things to Come and Moving that Invites Pausing. With the world coming to a stop, here came Ken Jacobs asking us to pause. The difference between 3D for One or Two Naked Eyes and Movie that Invites Pausing is, evidently, a frame-by-frame work so that the colours and textures welcome the act of pausing the film, the created depth by the intermittence of movement created by the viewer. Jacobs has said many times that he WANTS the film to be paused, it was made with that in mind. Whether we are talking about the film that is meant to be paused or the one that is made to be watched in one sitting, this is the best and most important film from the last decade.
Movie that Invites Pausing was dedicated to Hans Hoffman, and it seems that Jacobs is also going back to painting. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2023), Abstract Eternalism (2021) and Real Action Figures (2022) are films focused on the painted image, trying to create a metamorphosis with the brush of cinema over a different kind of still image. Real Action Figures might be his most radical, with changes so subtle that they are almost imperceptible -or perhaps there aren’t any changes and we’re trying to create the illusion ourselves- the eyes recalibrating in such a way that we see depth over black traces over a white canvas. There’s also Hoffman Student (2021), the title being self explanatory. With a little bit of luck, one can turn into a master, but one never stops being a student, and here Jacobs once again pays tribute to one of the most important figures in his artistic formation.
Book of Eternalisms (2023) might be the film that best captures what Ken Jacobs has been trying to do for the past decade. This film works as an almanac for his various eternalisms, a bookshelf to collect these impulses. Some of them also reappear in Other Urban Lives, Writhing City, and also in Up the Illusion, which has the same name as the exhibition in which we see the implementation of the retrospective at the gallery, Jacobs and his friends and family celebrating, watching the same films we’ll be watching; the Book of Eternalisms is the definitive way to see these pieces. Here, family portraits and little moments in the park are mixed with the architecture of the city, graffitis on buildings, the light between the passenger on a bus, reflections on windows, blurs of movement drawing lines of color and light out of automobiles, trees, etc. Many of these images could be considered as some of the best Jacobs has ever captured in his almost 60 years of making films. There are frames that respond beautifully to the use of the negative image but others look too saturated and overloaded with chromatic stimulus, but there’s always an element on which the eye can rest his glance, some shots only seem to exist so we can see the delicate change of colours, just in the corner of the frame. An innocent film, full of life.
And then there’s When Timofeev Moves Everything Moves (2022), starring his collaborator Viktor Timofeev, riding and playing around with his skateboard through the city, the world changing every time he takes off the ground or lands again. The camera sometimes stays with the lines of a basketball court, the terrain over which the wheels are passing, or sometimes, the images keep Timofeev floating in the air, as if in a Muybridge study, watching every single movement of his body. But here the skate acts like a magical wand or a brush, reforming reality, changing the world.
When Timofeev Moves Everything Moves ends like so many other films in this retrospective; with the image that triggered the inspiration that created the images we’ve just seen. Jacobs, by leaving them appear in full is not just revealing the magic trick like I said previously, he also seems to pay tribute to the block of marble from which he sculpted his work. Unlike Bill Morrison, Jacobs never takes ownership of these found films and photographs, he simply finds a way to express through them, always making sure to acknowledge the original work; a clear sign of an artist whose enthusiasm lies in form and not in the names associated with it, he doesn’t care about credit. In this case, the work that closes the film is a drawing by Timofeev: the building fronts full of ramps, the city as a constant collection of potential routes for his skateboard. A facade opening multiple possibilities, multiplying them to the infinite. And that’s how Jacobs sees the city as well.
Up the Illusion is a way to understand Ken Jacobs’ life story through the movies he made and his close relationship with a city he has known since the day he used a camera for the first time. The city has changed and so has he, but that never took away his wish to create, the eyes always looking for the next inspiration from quotidian life.
Maybe what’s most “unsettling” about Up the Illusion is the feeling that Ken Jacobs is finally closing the curtain, he’s giving a full stop to one of the richest, most sincere and radical bodies of work of avant-garde, experimental cinema, and to the moving image in general. He’s getting old and so does his wife Flo, both remaining inseparable. Time does not stand still, it always leaves his mark; also, in the artist’s opening-statement of the exhibition, Ken Jacobs makes himself clear saying that the Eternalism’s patent has expired and is now “up for grabs”. Even inventions and artworks can have an expiration date sometimes, it's a natural lifecycle, at least that 's the case within the market. But Jacobs never made films for the market, the curiosity is always there and the wish to create does not have the same expiration date.
A side event for the exhibition was a screening of XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (2022) at Light Industry. The film is a feature on which Jacobs uses an old black and white pornographic movie, stopping to see the movement of the trees, to create depth with the natural landscape, to give attention to the images contrast, and of course, to play with the movement of the bodies of the characters from the original film. The screening was packed but apparently there was one person who insisted in letting his discontent be known shouting and complaining throughout the film’s entire running time. At the Q&A that followed the screening, Jacobs said, more or less, that the reception wasn’t much different from the one it got 40 years ago, when he had just finished a first version. And probably, that’s the best indication that time hasn’t eroded these films at all, they are not getting old, in fact, they might be getting younger. With each passing year Jacobs reinforces his freedom, making simpler films, less and less interested in congratulating the viewer or in adorning his own reputation as an artist. He only cares about the visual experience, he cares about movement and duration and what those two elements can create when used together. It would be a tragedy if Ken Jacobs decides to stop making films, because after watching all the films from Up the Illusion retrospective, one is left with the feeling that he has enough energy to make films for the next 60 years. In any case, it’s him and only him that can decide. When you’re young you can do anything.