Depth Readings: Ken Jacobs’s Digital, Stereographic Films
Brooke Belisle
Forthcoming in Cinema Journal vol.53. No.2 (February 2014).
Abstract: Digitally composed from stereo photographs over a century old, Ken Jacobs’s 2006
Capitalism films unsettle spatiotemporal relationships that structure not only photographic and
cinematic representation but also dimensions of perception and history. They explore depth as an
aesthetic and a conceptual paradox, which has driven Jacobs’s career-long experiments in
“paracinema.”
Pedagogic side of this undertaking: “To educate the image-making medium
within us, raising it to a stereoscopic and dimensional seeing into the depths of
historical shadows.” —Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project1
Occupy Cinema or Paracinema. On November 13, 2011, two nights before New York City
police broke up the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park, protestors there were
treated to the “Ken Jacobs Occupy Cinema Program.” Jacobs chose the program, screening two
films that had premiered the previous month and two short films from 2006.2 The root title of the
2006 films, Capitalism, took on renewed significance in this context. The aesthetic of the
Capitalism films also resonated with the organized chaos of the encampment: flicker effects and
dissonant sounds fit the mood of unrest. The message the films bore for the protest went beyond
1
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 458. In this convolute (N1,8), Benjamin is
quoting Rudolf Borchardt, Epilegomena zu Dante (Berlin, 1923), 1:56–57.
2
This program was rescreened at Anthology Film Archives on January 7, 2013.
1
title and tone, borne also by their unusual use of stereo photographs from around the turn of the
twentieth century.
Every frame of Capitalism: Slavery (Ken Jacobs, 2006) was digitally composed from a
stereographic card depicting African Americans bending to pick cotton as a white man on
horseback stands guard behind them. Capitalism: Child Labor (Ken Jacobs, 2006) was made
from a stereograph that pictured boys working between rows of spindles in a thread factory while
several adults look on. These photographs, their stereographic format, and the conditions they
depict are marked as of the past, yet Jacobs asserted a present, and pressing, relevance by using
contemporary technology to galvanize these images, by screening them in Zuccotti Park, and by
casting them in an Occupy Cinema event as a performance of protest.
Projected in the Occupy Wall Street encampment, Jacobs’s films seemed to support the
protest’s broad intention to make conditions of capitalism visible. More than simply proposing
continuities, however, between contemporary economic realities and the history of slavery and
child labor, the Capitalism films stage a sense of historical perspective as complex repetition and
dynamic complicity. By concatenating photographic, cinematic, and digital strategies, these
hybrid works of media art strain the conventions of any one medium. They challenge analogies
that would associate structures of aesthetic experience with presumed structures of lived space
and historical time. They disrupt codified modes of representation and habitual ways of seeing to
challenge the assumptions that condition how we perceive space and time, both in cinema and
beyond it.
Ken Jacobs has been occupying cinema for a long time. A 2011 retrospective at
Anthology Film Archives titled Ken Jacobs in 3 Dimensions! surveyed work spanning five
2
decades, culminating in his recent digital experiments with depth effects.3 Jacobs was twenty
years old when audiences donned stereo glasses to watch It Came From Outer Space (Jack
Arnold, 1953), House of Wax (André de Toth, 1953), and Cat Women of the Moon (Arthur
Hilton, 1953). Over the following few decades, along with other American avant-garde
filmmakers, he turned away from Hollywood spectacles to explore basic elements of film form.
With films like Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969), he pursued what P. Adams
Sitney calls a structuralist approach to filmmaking, experimenting with found and
rephotographed footage, flicker effects, intricate loops, and repetitions.4 Eighty years old in
2013, Jacobs continues his experimentation, and since 1999 all his films have been digital.
Almost fifty years after Hollywood’s exuberant first wave of 3-D movies, a second wave
of digital 3-D seemed once again to herald the future of cinema. In exclamatory parody of this
Hollywood hype, Anthology’s Ken Jacobs in 3 Dimensions! program positioned Jacobs’s
progressive work as pointing toward the past, reinvoking stereoscopic strategies that preceded
cinema’s invention.5 For example, in Gift of Fire: Nineteen (Obscure) Frames That Changed the
World (Ken Jacobs, 2007), Jacobs uses anaglyph 3-D to spatially overlap frames from the short
series of images that Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince captured in 1888, which some claim as the
first film. Invoking Prometheus with his title, Jacobs elevates the illuminating impact of cinema
and the radical status of this material as, potentially, the first example of the medium. He
speculates that Le Prince’s nineteen frames may splice together, in succession, simultaneous
3
Ken Jacobs in 3 Dimensions! (film series, Anthology Film Archives, New York, May 12–19,
2012).
4
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002); on Jacobs’s more recent work, see P. Adams Sitney, “The
Ultimate Ken Jacobs,” Artforum 49, no. 9 (May 2011).
5
See catalog description, accessed June 18, 2013,
http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/film_screenings/series/37278.
3
pairs of images that were photographed with a stereo camera. Reassembling the frames as stereo
pairs to suggest that this footage contains a 3-D film, Jacobs asks us to see a different origin of
cinema at the origin of cinema.
In keeping with Gift of Fire, much of Jacobs’s work experiments with the production of
cinematic space and time, exploring how the perceptions of spatial depth and temporal continuity
may overlap, intersect, or overwrite one another. Although his work is most often called avantgarde, he coined the word paracinema to describe his practice as beyond, to the side of, or side
by side with cinema as we know it.6 Avoiding claims of progress and innovation, the idea of
paracinema resists technological determinism as well as what Rosalind Krauss calls the myth of
the avant-garde.7 Jacobs’s paracinema investigates possibilities that have been repeatedly passed
over and repeatedly rediscovered through the history of cinema, as the dream of more perfect
representation—what André Bazin referred to as the “myth of total cinema”—has been
continually recast.8
As Hollywood was experimenting with 3-D films in the 1950s, Jacobs was imagining
other ways that cinema could be transformed and was pursuing depth as something more
profound than a special effect. When he began making films, he was studying with the abstract
expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, and influenced by Hofmann’s theories, he learned to
6
In a 2008 letter Jacobs claimed that paracinema is “my term, from the late [s]ixties I
believe. . . . I meant parallel to traditional cinema technology, cinema by other means and just as
truly, as essentially cinematic.” See Ken Jacobs, letter to Esperanza Collado, March 20, 2008,
cited in Esperanza Collado, “Paracinema: from the Material of Film to the Dematerialization of
Cinema: A Study around the Transformations of Film’s Materiality in Avant-Garde Cinema”
(Ph.D. diss., College of Fine Arts, Cuenca, University of Castilla–La Mancha, 2008),
http://esperanzacollado.org/paracinema/jacobsletter.html.
7
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).
8
André Bazin, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004), 1:17–40.
4
apprehend an image as flat and fixed in time and yet, also, as dynamic and dimensional.9 In his
essay Painted Air, Jacobs describes his vision changing as he became “seduced by depth” and
began “feeling the impact of volumes everywhere.”10 He suggests that someone looking at the
painted surface of an abstract expressionist canvas might speculate about sequence and causality,
asking “what was what and where in depth,” as if “studying the scene of a crime and arriving at
more than one plausible idea of what happened.”11 This scene-of-a-crime metaphor imagines
temporality layered in space, inculcated within the image such that it appears as a surface effect.
As his essay’s title suggests, Jacobs hoped to translate the spatial complexity he found in
painting through the temporal medium of cinema, claiming he “saw something happening in
painting and made it happen in clock time.” He explored cinema as “painted air,” gestures of
projected light. Referencing both painting and film, Jacobs recollects: “Compound or multiple
depth readings of surface signs was desirable. Subtly planted signifiers that made for solid/openarea interchange vitalized the picture-plane[,] . . . a picture-plane that, in its eternal instant, holds
all back-and-forth and identity changes simultaneously in the perfect formula making up its
surface-display.”12 The “eternal instant” he describes contains shifts but does not itself change.
The painted image may appear still and singular, but it holds together different brushstrokes,
colors, and shapes; it encodes a temporal process of production and gives rise to multiple,
unfolding, interpretations (figure 1). It exposes a depth and multiplicity that it does not explicitly
Hans Hofmann, Search for the Real: And Other Essays, ed. Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H.
Hayes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); Frederico Windhausen, “Theories of Moving
Pictures: Ken Jacobs after Hans Hofmann,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed.
Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011),
232–244.
10
Ken Jacobs, “Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema,” Millennium Film
Journal, nos. 43–44 (2005), http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ43/KenJacobs.htm.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
9
5
render. In this description, spatial depth appears as a relationship of surfaces rather than as an
imagined extension beyond the frame; temporal depth does not extend the image itself in time
but is coiled up as the image, encoded in its form
Figure 1. Combinable Wall I and II, Hans Hoffman (1961). Oil on canvas. 84½ × 112½ inches
(214.6 × 285.8 cm). Collection of the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.
The metaphor of a crime scene, which Jacobs uses to describe abstract painting, has been
differently ascribed to the “evidentiary” quality of photography.13 If each photographic frame of
a film can be thought to indexically register “what was what and where” at the moment of
capture, it seems to cordon off whatever it pictures as a “scene,” a moment spatialized for
examination. In contrast to this understanding of cinema’s photographic basis, Jacobs’s work
does not seek a depth that is imagined beneath or behind the cinematic image, in the emulsion of
the filmstrip or the reality that its photographs index. Instead, he imagines the possibility “to stop
13
For example, see Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility: Third
Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael William
Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 258.
6
and look around between frames” of a film, seeing the open area of a film’s temporal gaps as
something like the spacing of a photographic motion study, a site of “interchange” where
“compound or multiple depth readings” are generated and yield multiple ideas of “what
happened.”14
Like the purloined letter, what Jacobs searches for and finds is hidden only by a particular
way of seeing. He often uses the word mining to describe his work with found footage, as if he
digs into the flow of images to find riches buried there. But Jacobs’s mining does not penetrate
as much as create what he calls “depth readings,” or seeing spatiotemporal relationships that
emerge between multiple aspects and points of view. What he is looking for is not found in the
evidence of each photographic frame but instead emerges through contingent relationships
produced through acts of seeing as dynamic, perceptual encounters.
Return to the Scene of the Crime. As media scholars consider the shift from analog to digital
technologies, some see Ken Jacobs’s work as signaling how investments in cinematic traditions
might be carried forward into a new era of moving-image media.15 Jacobs’s adoption of digital
tools seems to bear special significance for this transition because his work has been celebrated
for exploring the interstice between still and moving image, for foregrounding the grain of a
photographic image as if to consider the historical residue it may encode.16 Jacobs seems to
14
Jacobs, “Painted Air.”
15
See Eivind Røssaak, “Algorithmic Culture: Beyond the Photo/Film Divide,” in Between
Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, ed. Eivind Røssaak (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2011); Malcolm Turvey, “Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist,”
October 137 (2011): 107–124.
16
See especially Sitney, Visionary Film; Eivind Røssaak, “Acts of Delay: The Play between
Stillness and Motion in Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs,
ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press,
2011), 96–106.
7
thematize his own shift into new media with Return to the Scene of the Crime (Ken Jacobs,
2008), a digital piece that reworks the found footage he also used for his best-known film, Tom,
Tom, the Piper's Son—a rephotographed paper print of a 1905 Biograph film of the same name.
Directly linking digital possibilities with the history of early and avant-garde cinema, work like
this sparks the hope that a digital avant-garde might combine technological innovation and
progressive aesthetics as visual culture turns into a new “algorithmic” era.17
Titling his “remake” Return to the Scene of the Crime, Jacobs confesses that he sneaks
back to the site of a past thrill and adds another iteration to an image that has already been
reinterpreted through multiple media.18 In addition, the title refers with mock seriousness to the
event of a stolen pig that organizes the narrative of the Biograph film. Evoking Jacobs’s way of
describing depth in painting, the notion of a crime scene also helps communicate why he might
revisit images that have already been so thoroughly worked over. Rather than pointing toward a
digital future, it suggests that digital tools may offer new ways of looking, revealing different
clues and stories nested in the surface of a familiar image. One digital effect in the 2008 film
expresses this idea visually: as a juggler seems to juggle still frames of the film itself, multiple
image planes spin within the imagined depth of a scene that is revealed as flat through this very
gesture (figure 2).19
See Jeffrey Skoller, “ReAnimator: Embodied History, and the Post-Cinema Trace in Ken
Jacobs’ ‘Temporal Composites,’” in Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan (New York:
Routledge, 2013), 224-247. On the algorithmic turn, see William Urrichio, “The Algorithmic
Turn: Photosynth, Augmented Reality and the Changing Implications of the Image,” Visual
Studies 26, no. 1 (2011) 25-35.
18
Jacobs also revisited this footage in Nervous System performances from 1975 to 1980 titled
The Impossible, chapters 1–4. The Biograph film was itself based on an engraving made after a
painting based on a poem.
19
Røssaak, “Algorithmic Culture,” reads this moment as a play between still and moving
images.
17
8
Figure 2. Still from Return to the Scene of the Crime (Ken Jacobs, 2008).
If we assume that Jacobs’s early work with found footage investigated the photographic
ontology of cinema, then the new digital work could thematize the new ontology of the digital
image. The juggler may figure Jacobs’s own role as playful remixer in a mise-en-abyme of
possible digital iterations. But we might also see the digital effects of Return as a way Jacobs
continues old experiments through new means. If Jacobs’s digital strategies restage those of his
earlier films, this may not bridge the break between analog and digital so much as refute that
such a rift exists and challenge how interpretations of those earlier films privilege cinema’s
photographic basis.
Tom, Tom (Jacobs, 1969) enacts a way of reattending to the Biograph footage by isolating
and meditating on particular details. Repeating a gesture of a woman in a bulbous dress—who
moves through a hoop that she flips over her head—exaggerates the physical comedy of the
9
fairground stunt, perhaps foregrounding cinema itself as an “attraction.”20 But lingering on the
trick transforms it, and by overrepeating a joke, something appears on the other side of its
absurdity. A layering of reality and representation loosens and different modes of repetition
reverberate. Eivind Røssaak explains the affective experience of such moments as a suspension
of “the filmic diegesis” such that “real life” appears: “the characters in the film seem
momentarily to leave the narrative behind and approach the spectator with another quality, as
real people or ghosts of the dead returning from a distant past.”21 Røssaak does not attribute this
“uncanny effect” to repetition but rather to “suspensions of movement” that transform “the hereand-now flow of the cinematic action into the that-has-been of the photographic.”22 For Røssaak,
arresting film frames as photographic stills “install[s] a transgressive communion between . . .
the present of the past caught on film and the spectator’s present,” and in “Jacobs’s extremely
intimate investigation” of found footage, “lives once lived . . . live again.” 23 Røssaak draws on
Roland Barthes’s formulation of photographic temporality, but for Barthes, such intimacy would
not be resurrection as much as an intimation of mortality, signaling every present as a future past
that will have been.24
Røssaak’s argument builds on a tradition of film theory that correlates cinema’s basis in
photography with its ability to capture presence and produce empathetic perspectives. André
Bazin famously claimed that the camera’s “impassive lens, stripping the object of all those ways
of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes
Tom Gunning, “Now You See It, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of
Attractions,” in The Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson, Peter Krämer, and Tom Gunning
(New York: Routledge, 2004), 41–50.
21
Røssaak, “Acts of Delay,” 103.
22
Ibid., 104; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 77.
23
Røssaak, “Acts of Delay,” 140, 105.
24
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96–97.
20
10
have covered it, is able to present it in all its virgin purity to my attention and consequently to my
love.”25 Siegfried Kracauer argued that because film, as an “extension of photography,” captures
“fragments” of “material reality,” it has the potential to “virtually make the world our home” by
“help[ing] us to appreciate . . . our given material environment” and extending our sphere of
concern through encounters by cinematic proxy.26
Unlike Røssaak, however, Bazin and Kracauer did not find the photographic potentials of
cinema at odds with its moving images. Claiming that photography “embalms time,” Bazin
argued that a film’s frames do not “create eternity” by freezing things, unchanging, as much as
capture the “the image of their duration,” the temporal unfolding of existence itself. Rather than
photographically preserving an object, film renders “change mummified.”27 Likewise, Kracauer
claimed that a film’s series of photographs catches the world “on the wing,” “life at its most
ephemeral,” communicating something of the contingency, endlessness, and indeterminacy of
the world’s own coherence.28 Rather than emphasizing the indexical quality of the individual
photograph, Kracauer emphasized how film can express “the flow of life . . . kaleidoscopic
sights . . . fragmentary visual complexes . . . an incessant flow of possibilities and near-intangible
meanings . . . an unfixable flow which carries fearful uncertainties and alluring excitements.”29
For Kracauer and Bazin, cinema’s expression of reality was rooted in a relationship between its
temporal sequence of images and the flow of time itself.
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema?, 1:15.
26
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 304.
27
Bazin, “Ontology,” 14–15. On Bazin, see Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, History,
Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
28
Kracauer, Theory of Film, xlix. On Kracauer, see Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience:
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012).
29
Kracauer, Theory of Film, 72–73.
25
11
The way cinema engages history is not limited to the indexicality or stasis of its
photographic frames but includes how cinematic series of photographs may capture, construct, or
challenge how one moment appears to relate to another. In Tom, Tom, Jacobs not only arrests the
film’s motion but also produces reordered temporalities; he transgresses the expected
relationship between the temporality of what the film depicts and the temporality of the film
itself. This, in turn, disrupts an expected congruence between an “actual” time captured by the
film (the “that has been” of every frame) and the viewer’s embodied sense of duration. Viewers
experience a dissonance between the structures of time that the film performs, what they take to
be the structure of historical time, and time as it unfolds, for them, from moment to moment.
Rather than perfectly capturing or reanimating reality, cinema’s coordination of
spatiotemporal coherence may express something about the performative and provisional nature
of reality’s appearance. It can suggest how actual life and time subtend representations with
which they do not completely coincide. Jacobs’s work with found footage does not excavate or
reanimate photographs in a nostalgic desire to bring back the dead or the past. It quickens the
sense of a present passing in ungraspable complexity.
One Perspective Times Another. After decades of working with analog film, Jacobs’s recent,
digital work mines the possibilities of a new medium, inventing aesthetics for a “postcinematic”
era.30 But the creative force of this work does not derive from digital media so much as through
Jacobs’s long investigation of the paracinematic. In interviews, Jacobs recalls an undocumented,
early installation titled Festoon (circa 1970) that established some of his career’s lasting
William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Mark Hansen, “Seeing with the Body: The Digital Image in
Postphotography,” Diacritics 31, no. 4 (2001): 54–84; Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect
(Winchester, UK: Zero Books 2012).
30
12
themes.31 To build the piece, he gathered discarded, mainstream movie trailers and hung their
35mm color filmstrips between tree branches like clotheslines. The festooned filmstrips were
arranged at about eye level, each with a lightweight, cardboard stereoscope attached to it.
Spectators were invited to hold the stereoscope against their eyes and walk along the filmstrip,
stopping at a coupling of their choice. Projection would ordinarily galvanize the film’s frames
into the illusion of a continuous image, but in this case, the spectator physically moved to scan a
static filmstrip. Sliding a stereoscope across film frames was a literal way of playing or watching
movie clips in stereoscopic 3-D. Rather than adding a dimensional illusion, however, this
experiment broke one down.
Figure 3. A stereoscope and stereograph, exemplary of the design Oliver Wendell Holmes
popularized circa 1861.
Festoon used two visual formats and two different ways of seeing to mutually disrupt one
another. Rather than adding up adjacent temporal perspectives as cinematic duration, or adjacent
I learned the title of this work, and other details that inform this essay, in a series of
conversations and emails and in an interview on January 21, 2013, with Ken and Flo Jacobs.
31
13
spatial perspectives as stereoscopic depth, the experiment mixed modes of temporal and spatial
coherence to produce an incoherent hybrid. Normally, a stereoscope presents a viewer with two
photographs of the same thing taken at the same time, but it does so from vantage points a few
inches apart, approximating the distance between most people’s eyes (figure 3). Presenting one
photograph to each eye, a stereoscope prompts us to interpret them in terms of our own
embodied perspective. The photographed object or scene appears three-dimensional to the degree
that we coordinate the spatial difference between two images as the dimensionality of space, a
depth that relates us to what we are seeing. But in Jacobs’s experiment, placing a stereoscope on
a filmstrip paired film frames several inches apart. For the spectator, this meant looking,
simultaneously, at two images filmed several moments apart and attempting to fuse them in the
present tense of perception.
Festoon set a cinematic convention of seriality and a stereoscopic convention of
simultaneity against each other. Jacobs describes the results as follows:
Stereo viewers could be slid from place to place to optically couple frames
(seen sideways, a first step to disorientation) two and a half inches apart,
forming stereo images (one perspective times another equals infinity) that
made no spatial sense. Instead of the orderly and consistent plunge into
depth one sees with adjacent eyes, reporting to the arbitrating mind
similarities and differences in their parallel fields of view[,] . . . [i]t was
time seen as depth, with no respect shown for the ways things normally
stack up one behind the other, viewer to horizon.32
Ibid.
32
14
Jacobs suggests that by coordinating nonadjacent film frames, the sliding stereoscope in his
installation reorganizes not only cinematic conventions but also perceptual conventions. The
cinematic illusion of duration and the stereoscopic illusion of depth both rely on a perceptual
elision of multiple images; they require compounding “one perspective times another” to
produce temporal or spatial depth. Jacobs’s installation crosses these different perceptual effects,
compounding the perspective of one medium and that of another. Rather than adding up to an
illusion, this deranges the illusions each medium would produce, fracturing and intertwining
them into new combinations. Jacobs names this exponential form of perspective and its faceted
dimensionality “infinity” because it seems to open or multiply rather than consolidate that which
it draws into relationship. He understands the infinite view of “one perspective times another” as
an uncomfortable explosion of normal ways of seeing and an encounter with destabilizing
possibilities.
Using a stereoscope to produce what Jacobs might call a depth reading of cinematic
images shatters them into something like abstract expressionist paintings. Jacobs says that
“looking into a stereo-viewer one saw suspended explosions,” “a novel rupture of form”; “time’s
depth could jumble logical placement so that shards of objects once understood to be background
could appear forward of foreground objects, and solids might open to allow other forms to
occupy them.”33 This interpenetration of objects, like brushstrokes on a canvas, produces
dimensions of depth that appear as surface relationships rather than as dimensions behind the
surface. The “suspended explosions” seen in the filmstrip installation echo the “eternal instant”
that Jacobs attributes to abstract painting, suggesting a paradox of stasis and duration, stillness
and movement.
Ibid.
33
15
Jacobs describes Festoon as a failure because most people saw something that did not
make sense and walked away. Looking through the stereo viewer at the festooned filmstrips, the
spectator attempted to coordinate an image that came apart and jumbled through her very effort
to see it. By layering one interface over another, Festoon deconstructs medium-specific ways of
organizing perspective and surfaces alternative possibilities that could emerge between two
different ways of seeing. More than simply remixing media formats, this draws out and frustrates
the perceptual habits that such visual media model and subtend.
By refusing to produce ordinary spatiotemporal relationships, Festoon proposes that such
relationships are more contingent than otherwise presumed. Making its participants aware of
how having two eyes and being dynamically situated in space frames their perceptual experience,
Festoon suggests that ordinary perspective is itself conditioned by parameters analogous to
aesthetic conventions and may itself entail effects analogous to stereoscopic and cinematic
constructions. In other words, by disrupting how viewers coordinate what they see, Jacobs’s
installation not only challenges conventions that structure how we make sense of representations
but also suggests that similar conventions structure how we visualize the world and our place in
it.
Festoon prompted participants to consider how their sense of the world’s stable
dimensions, the way they perceptually “plunge into depth,” may already be organized by habits
and assumptions that work, much like the rules of stereographic or cinematic representation, to
orchestrate an “orderly and consistent” visual experience. This challenges the logical way things
would stack up not only in one media format but also, as Jacobs says, from “viewer to horizon.”
It explodes habits of organizing difference and distance, of orienting ourselves within
dimensions of space and time that we would like to stack neatly from here to there.
16
Activating perspective only to frustrate its conventions, Jacobs’s provocation does not
debunk the reality effects of reality itself so much as suggest expanded views that open when
different orders of seeing collide to coordinate alternative perspectives. Refusing ordinary
constructions of depth that fix relationships between one aspect and another, Jacobs’s work
reimagines how spatial and temporal dimensions that relate us to what we see might go beyond
received perspectives to coordinate different perceptions, places, and moments into unexpected
structures of correspondence, interpretation, and meaning.
Eternalism and Capitalism. Rather than using digital technologies to invent “new” forms of 3D, Jacobs’s recent use of digital tools explores a paracinematic history of depth and extends
techniques he has developed through a series of related experiments. Shortly after Festoon,
Jacobs continued its investigation of alternative conjunctions through his Nervous System
device, which allowed him, in live performances, to hand operate two film projectors loaded
with two prints of the same film.34 With frame-by-frame control, he could rhythmically stagger
and overlap images from limited footage into almost endless, and unusual, perceptual couplings.
More recently, just as he turned to working exclusively digitally, Jacobs began performing with a
new device, the Nervous Magic Lantern, which reaches back to his roots in painting by using
hand-painted slides. It also relies on precinematic technologies, using a spinning shutter that
Alphonse Schilling adapted, in his work with stereoscopic images, from nineteenth-century
strategies of magic-lantern projection. With experimental formats that return to the stereoscope
For detailed discussions of the Nervous System and its performance history from 1975 to
2000, see Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, eds., Optic Antics: The Cinema of
Ken Jacobs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
34
17
and magic lantern, Jacobs recasts the “precinematic” as paracinematic, thus recovering
possibilities that developed alongside cinema without becoming fully incorporated by it.
Digital editing tools allow Jacobs to recast the performative and provisional effects of his
hand-operated projection systems as, instead, algorithmic and reproducible. In 2006 he received
a patent for an effect he had invented in Nervous System performances, which he calls
eternalism or eternalizing: “a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimensionalmotion-direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures.”35 In his digital work,
Jacobs creates “eternalisms” by arranging images, interspersed with black frames, in carefully
prescribed patterns along the horizontal timeline of film-editing software. With jump cuts
operating at microintervals, and simulating a shutter by interleaving black frames, this process
creates flicker effects that cross spatial and temporal depth to produce wavering illusions of
three-dimensionality and of movement. It invokes the thaumatrope’s trick of merging distinct
images into apparent superimposition, and it simulates stereoscopic projection through the rapid
alteration between two related vantage points. Flickering two perspectives of the same moment
produces a hybrid between still and moving image, and a depth that, in Jacobs’s words, “seems
constantly caught in the act of being generated out of flat elements.”36
The name eternalism recalls Jacobs’s description of an abstract painting “that, in its
eternal instant, holds all back-and-forth and identity changes simultaneously in the perfect
formula making up its surface display.” The eternalism effect elaborates this paradox of singular
multiplicity and dynamic stasis in terms of cinematic duration, suggesting motion that,
Text of 2006 patent filed by Jacobs, “Eternalism, a Method for Creating an Appearance of
Sustained Three-Dimensional Motion-Direction of Unlimited Duration, Using a Finite Number
of Pictures,” US Patent 7,030,902 B2, filed January 22, 2002, and issued April 18, 2006.
36
Ibid. Skoller, “ReAnimator,” proposes the notion of a “digital temporal-composite” to describe
how these images commingle beyond the logic of juxtaposition or superimposition.
35
18
impossibly, does not seem to repeat or progress, always beginning to happen. Jacobs calls this
“the appearance of transfixed continuous motion (a going without going anywhere).”37 It pictures
a moment that constantly passes and therefore does not pass, thereby allegorizing the paradox of
the present as a now that is constantly disappearing and yet always obtains.
As the ism of its name suggests, eternalism is a mechanism and an objectification of
action. As an illusion that exposes itself as an illusion, it suggests how the unfolding of time may
be a perspectival effect. It rethinks temporal depth as Festoon rethought spatial depth. Festoon
challenged the idea that things stack up neatly one behind the other from here to there. The
eternalism effect challenges the idea of a historical continuum in which moments stack one after
the other, lined up in a timeline from now to then.
The same year that Jacobs received a patent for his eternalism technique, he used it to
make a handful of films that animate stereoscopic photographs from around the turn of the
twentieth century, including the two Capitalism films he later screened in Zuccotti Park.38
Working with digital editing software, Jacobs constructed each film using only the two
photographic images of the original stereoscopic pair and timed, unlit pauses. A stereograph’s
two adjacent photographs were usually taken at the same moment from vantage points several
inches apart. A stereoscope would align each image of the stereograph with each eye of the
viewer, such that the images might be visually combined in an illusion of simultaneity and
spatial depth. Jacobs’s appropriation, however, juxtaposes a stereoscopic pair of photographs
across successive film frames. By flickering between the two perspectives of the stereo pair,
Jacobs recasts slight differences in perspective as an illusion of movement and change, thus
Ibid.
38
Jacobs’s Hanky Panky January 1902 (2006) and The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006) are
produced from stereographs, as are Nymph (2007), We Are Charming (2007), and His Favorite
Wife Improved (2007).
37
19
transforming the single, static, moment that the original stereo image pictured into a cinematic
experience that suggests a temporal unfolding. These films showcase the eternalism effect as a
digitally enabled hybrid of stereoscopic and cinematic representation. They transform old
photographs into moving, contemporary encounters, drawing turn-of-the-century images into
dynamic and visceral relationships with a twenty-first century present.
Jacobs’s stereograph films revisit Festoon but invert its strategy. The earlier installation
used cinematic frames as stereoscopic pairs, but these films use stereoscopic photographs as film
frames. They suspend the subject photographed on the cusp of presence, as if to share the
trajectory of the viewer’s lived duration. Viewed through a stereoscope, a stereograph’s image is
anchored by the viewer, its depth coordinated by his or her bodily sense of space. But Jacobs’s
films refract the visual difference between a stereograph’s two images into a temporal paradox
that both pivots on and frustrates the viewer’s sense of being situated within an unfolding
present. They offer viewers images they cannot anchor, an uncoordinated space and time that
destabilize viewers’ perspective. Reworking the stereoscopic effect as a cinematic effect unravels
a neat coordination into a tense and stuttering disorientation. If looking at a filmstrip through a
stereoscope figured “time as depth,” then these films, viewing stereographs through cinema,
figure depth as time.
The found images used for the two stereographic digital films Jacobs screened in Zuccotti
Park during the Occupy Wall Street protest—Capitalism: Slavery and Capitalism: Child
Labor—were sold in stereoscopic sets popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s (figure 4).39
On stereographic photography, see William Darrah, The World of Stereographs (Nashville,
TN: Land Yacht Press, 1997); Ellen Strain, “Exotic Bodies, Distant Landscapes: Touristic
Viewing and Popularized Anthropology in the Nineteenth Century,” Wide Angle 18, no. 2
(1996): 70–100; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).
39
20
Images like these were often sequenced in numbered “views,” perhaps structured as a “tour” of
American industry from the fields of the South to the factories of the North or as a series
illustrating textile manufacturing from picking cotton to spinning thread. The titles of Jacobs’s
films recall the matter-of-fact indexing, labeling, and subcategorizing of those collections, but
they reclassify the scenes according to a different affect. Images like these were meant to
advertise and celebrate an emerging system of production. They helped orient viewers within
forces of empire and industrialization that reorganized space and time in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, thus restructuring material relationships through capitalism’s virtual
trajectories of value and exchange. Their illusion of depth helped consolidate a dislocated scene
according to a particular point of view and subject position. They mapped a broad coordination
of power at the scale of embodied perception.
Figure 4. A copy of the stereograph used to produce Capitalism: Slavery (1895, published by
Underwood and Underwood).
21
The caption for the stereograph used to make Capitalism: Slavery reads “Cotton Is King:
Plantation Scene, Georgia” (figure 3). In the paired photographs, positioned almost at the
vanishing point, a white man on horseback figures a point of view that corresponds to that of the
expected stereograph viewer. Like the stereograph viewer, the supervisor seems to survey the
scene from within it, and yet from a distance. His position and embedded perspective anchors the
depth of the image and occupies the privileged subject position that organizes this as a “view”
and a “scene” even before it was stereographed. We would like to think that we look at this
image from another, farther perspective, separated by a century's distance and difference. Its
sepia tones suggest the patina of historicity. Its stereographic format seems as antiquated as the
scene it pictures and complicit with an antiquated point of view. We do not want to elide our
present moment and point of view with this one or to embody the abandoned subject position the
stereograph asks us to step into. We do not want to reopen the dimensions of this scene, bringing
it into perceptual relief as if we stood within it. Ken Jacobs speaks for us when he relabels this
image “slavery.”
But by naming it as an aspect of capitalism, Jacobs suggests that slavery itself takes place
within a scene that extends beyond the plantation, Georgia, and the turn of a bygone century.
Capitalism is a scene we still inhabit. As the two spatial perspectives of a stereograph coordinate
to produce one view, our perspective in the present and this perspective from the past might
coordinate as a historical dimension relating now and then. We might see that time and this one,
their world and ours, their capitalism and ours, as mutually contingent. The stereoscope,
stereographs like these, and the scenes such images picture all helped prepare the point of view
from which we look back at them. Our own moment may appear as the future toward which that
past social structure, economic order, and imaging technology all now seem to point. Looking
22
back at these stereo views, Jacobs’s films and their contemporary audiences occupy a world that
such images—the moment they issue from, the things they picture, and their very means of
picturing—seems to posit.
The paradoxical effect of the eternalism technique draws out the formal and conceptual
difficulty of these films. The idea of the eternal as equivalence across time, a presence at once
arrested and continuous, connects the historical past of the moment captured with the lived
present of the moment in which the image is viewed. Producing an impression of constant
motion that impossibly does not seem to repeat or progress, Jacobs uses eternalism as a critique
of progress. In Capitalism: Slavery a black woman stoops continually toward a cotton plant as a
white man perpetually looms toward her on a horse ever in midstride. She does not stoop again
and again but seems to continue the same gesture, moving toward the cotton without getting any
closer.
Producing the illusion of motion by cycling between two photographs of the same
moment, these films capture their subjects in suspended animation. This invites viewers to
perceive differences and changes that are foreclosed in the same gestures in which they are
promised, that is, exposed as effects that the viewer participates in producing. The relationship
between master and slave in Capitalism: Slavery is captured in a gesture that does not complete
itself and that refuses to be contained within the past as a narrative moment clicking into place in
a historical scene. Rather, the gesture continually releases its charge. The image seems to turn on
its own axis in an act of exposure, opening out in the time and space of the viewer while also
collapsing into its own depths. It draws the viewer into a visual and temporal experience that
feels like a revolving door.
23
The eternalism is a temporal version of the stereoscopic effect: it uses flicker to juxtapose
two spatial perspectives such that persistence of vision might combine them. Looking through a
stereoscope, we hold two views of the same space together, as the spatial depth of our
perspective. Looking at an eternalism, we hold two views of the same moment together, as the
temporal depth of our perspective. Jacobs’s Capitalism films generate the appearance of
movement and change between moments that are actually different faces of the same moment.
Relating past and present in uncomfortable dimensions of simultaneity, they propose temporal
perspective, and by extension historical perspective, as a perspectival effect.
Suspended Explosions. The discomfort the viewer experiences in watching Capitalism: Child
Labor connects its subject to its structure. While Capitalism: Slavery plays for only several,
silent minutes, Capitalism: Child Labor plays for almost a quarter hour and demands a high
degree of perceptual involvement. With only two photographs filling this duration, the viewer
may at first be frustrated by repetition. The first few minutes of the film contain very little
movement except a pulsing flicker as the scene in the thread factory fills the full frame. Rows of
spindles layer from left to right and from foreground to background, marking the volume of the
large, open space with a visual grid (figure 5). Tall columns, hanging ceiling fans, and high
windows add to this effect, produces counterpoints that tensely stretch the room from edge to
edge. The visual indications of spatial dimension in this image make it well suited to the
stereographic format, by helping to dramatize its three-dimensional effect. The dense display of
machinery also works to emphasize technicity itself as a spectacle and visual pleasure. At the
time these images were originally produced, people toured industrial sites like factories to
experience the spectacle of mechanical multiplicity, procedural complexity, and operational
24
precision that constituted what Neil Harris has called an “operational aesthetic” and what David
Nye has called a “technological sublime.”40
Figure 5. A copy of the stereograph used to produce Capitalism: Child Labor (1903, published
by Underwood and Underwood). Caption reads: “In the great Spinning Room—104,000
Spindles—Olympian Cotton Mills, Columbia, South Carolina.”
Capitalism: Child Labor undermines the visual pleasure of technicity by also
incorporating a sense of the mechanical as repetitive motion and sound. The sense of spinning
and whirring—the motion of the spindles in action—is expressed through an overall vibration of
the flickering image, and the humming, metallic sounds of a musical score that resonates along
with the pulsation of the image. The film’s thirteen minutes become trying not only because of
the film’s aggressive flicker but also because of its loud, needling soundtrack. The score, written
for the film by Rick Reed, begins with a rhythmic drone and whirr that seems to corroborate the
Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);
David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).
40
25
factory mise-en-scène.41 The sound quickly expands into multiple layers, adding electronic notes,
mechanical whines, and dramatic swells that flirt with film-score conventions only to crescendo
without denouement. This score, seeming to build toward what is felt only as repetition, escalates
the sense of anxiety produced by the image, which convulses and seems to constantly change
without really changing at all or reaching any conclusion.
This film has only two photographs of the same thing to show us: one moment and place.
But the film constantly transforms. Without adding further images, Jacobs evolves the image
over the duration of the film by manipulating what seems to emerge in the foreground and by
subtly managing the viewer’s focus. By manipulating the size and placement of the two
photographs within the visual frame and by exposing different aspects in different patterns,
Jacobs produces cinematic effects. His editing singles out characters, invests details with
significance, and suggests actions and interpretations (figures 6 and 7).
Figures 6 and 7. Screen captures from Capitalism: Child Labor.
Abigail Child, “The Piper’s Son: Content and Performance in the Films of Ken Jacobs,” in
Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113.
41
26
As the film emphasizes elements of the scene in specific repetitions, relationships
emerge. The presence of one supervisor seems to fill the room, threatening. Another stands
akimbo, and intercut with a boy’s bare feet, his posture of authority seems to draw out the boy’s
bodily vulnerability. Returning repeatedly to the eyes of one man seen peering over a row of
spindles sutures the viewer into an exchange of glances and produces a sense of catching him as
he spies from a hiding place.42 A montage of several children in quick succession seems to
animate them in mechanical gestures of work, thus suggesting the shared labor that unites them.
As hands of different boys in different positions blend to produce the impression of one boy
pulling something from left to right, the children’s individual identities are effaced into
mechanical equivalents like the spindles they operate (figure 8).
Jacobs takes advantage of cinematic structures of meaning. But other effects exceed
cinematic grammar, as the space pulses, divides, and torques against itself. The scene
reverberates with factory rhythms, the shape of the spindles echoes that of the columns, and the
whole room seems to spin. The image frustrates our expectations of photography, stereography,
and cinema, but it also frustrates our basic perceptual involvement.
Figure 8. A portion of the “digital filmstrip” of Capitalism: Child Labor as it appears in digital
editing software.
Antoine de Baeque’s explores the specific temporal implications of the “gaze-to-camera” in
such moments, when an on-screen gaze seems to meet the gaze of the film spectator. See
Antoine de Baeque, Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012).
42
27
Jacobs used digital software to lay out each frame of this film in a linear arrangement,
with uneven gaps of intervening black frames. This effort reimagines Eadweard Muybridge’s
motion studies in a digital medium and enacts what Jacobs once called “time/motion studies.”43
By digitally orchestrating different aspects of different perspectives at different scales, Jacobs
creates unusual effects of motion, each distinct and suggestive. Sometimes the image seems to
divide against itself, as if fault lines shift in earthquakes of internal opposition. Sometimes the
image appears to erupt with motion that ripples out. Sometimes the image vibrates; sometimes it
jerks. Sometimes it seems to swing. It spins, gyrates, rotates, pulsates, shakes. It moves in and
out, widening and compressing, undulating, squashing and stretching; it expands toward the
foreground and recedes into the background. As soon as the viewer takes hold of a certain detail
or point of view, the image reorganizes, exposing other aspects and suggesting other meanings.
The most intriguing illusion of the Capitalism films is their appearance as films. In
Jacobs’s treatment, the photographed scene seems to yield to what Anne Friedberg called
cinema’s “virtual, mobilized gaze.”44 Juxtaposed in time, the different vantage points from which
the two stereo images were taken suggest not only a depth of the pictured scene but also motion
within that depth. Given the film’s conceits, this suggests camera movement, seeming to index
the passage of time at the level of the film’s own form. When Jacobs “eternalizes” a figure, our
point of view seems to rotate around it, as if moving within the time and volume of a profilmic
world that is continuous in its very visibility with our own.
The disarming effects of the Capitalism films have been read as forms of reanimation, in
every sense of that word. Abigail Child describes Capitalism: Slavery as “a tableau brought to
43
Ken Jacobs, “Notes on the Nervous System,” in Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs
Retrospective (New York: Museum of the Moving Image, 1989), 24.
44
Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994).
28
vivid mobility” as Jacobs “wrenches meaning, movement, and time from the static image.”45
Recalling Røssaak’s contention that arresting film frames as photographic stills brings out the
“real life” captured there, Child makes the reverse claim, arguing that Jacobs makes “a scene
come to life” when he digitally “animates the still twinned images” of a stereograph into
cinematic motion, duration, and implicit narrative.46 She also echoes Røssaak’s notion of
resurrection, claiming that Jacobs’s work with stereographs “brings the dead to life” and sets the
viewer in relationship to a past present such that “we want to meet these people—we do meet
them. For a breathtaking moment we are there.”47 This reading credits the eternalism effect with
achieving the illusion it names—as if discrete moments of a cinematic timeline were fused as
facets of an eternal time, an all-embracing photographic instant.
Just as Tom, Tom does not resurrect the past by arresting film frames, the Capitalism
films do not do so by animating photographs. Restaging the spatial depth of a stereograph in
cinematic time does not bring it to life as much as disclose the way time has been suspended in
the image. As our point of view appears to move within the scene, we approach the limit of the
photographs’ spatial and temporal depth, and forms that seemed on the verge of liveliness appear
as cardboard cutouts showing their edges. Jacobs has argued that his manipulations create a
“magnification” such that there is “more time in that time.”48 Rather than “a tableau brought to
vivid mobility,” as Child describes it, this magnification recalls the relationship Roland Barthes
describes between photograph and tableau: “in the photograph, Time’s immobilization
assume[s] . . . an excessive, monstrous mode; Time is Engorged (whence the relation with the
Child, “Piper’s Son,” 113.
46
Ibid.
47
Ibid.
48
Ken Jacobs, “Interview with Ken Jacobs,” in Films That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs
Retrospective (New York: Museum of the Moving Image, 1989), 33.
45
29
Tableau Vivant, whose mythic prototype is the princess falling asleep in Sleeping Beauty).”49
Jacobs’s cinematic presentation “engorges” the suspended instant the stereograph captures,
distending and deforming its photographic flatness into something other than the illusion of life
toward which stereographic depth aimed.50
In translating stereographic photographs into digital films and refracting spatial depth
into temporal duration, Jacobs’s Capitalism films use digital technology to reengage stereoscopic
illusions. They do not, however, digitally restage the stereoscopic illusion to suggest that the
temporal depth of history might be experienced like the spatial depth of a stereograph. They do
not stage the past as a virtual reality, an alternate present we could step into. Instead, they
produce it as an image suspended in the animation of our perspective. They involve viewers in
producing effects that do not pretend to be anything more. Watching the Capitalism films,
viewers engage their own effort to consolidate an image that refuses to cohere or become
graspable as an external object but that also rejects immersive absorption as a virtually
inhabitable space. Rather than vivifying the past in the present or reactivating an antique format
with a new technology, the stereographic films refuse to shore up any presumption of an orderly
or coherent relationship between the moment they capture and the moments in which they are
viewed; they produce this relationship as a continued explosion.
The Capitalism films escalate the stakes of Festoon, mutually complicating both the
spatial horizon in which the stereoscope would visually arrange things from here to there and the
temporal horizon in which film would arrange things from then to now. In the suspended
explosions people saw when they slid stereo viewers over film frames, solid objects opened,
49
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.
50
This temporal engorgement could also be considered a hyberbolically pregnant moment; see
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
30
planes shattered, and shards of background and foreground were reorganized. In the
interweaving of different moments, space came undone. The Capitalism films repeat the
experiment of drawing two different times together. They confuse and fracture planes of now
and then, viscerally demonstrating that the moment we look at and the moment we look from
might interweave in strange combinations. They jumble the structure of cinematic time, and the
view of historicity it models, which would conventionally stack moments in a timeline unfolding
toward the horizon of a future. They suggest the way in which historical perspective and
representational conventions interrelate: the past seeming fixed like a photograph; the present
appearing to progress like a film.51
Shocking How Things Come and Go. Jacobs’s Capitalism films disrupt an apparent dichotomy
in the way that time and depth have been understood in film and in the way that cinema has been
thought to model or alter perception. In a phenomenological approach often associated with
André Bazin, the “deep focus” aesthetics of Jean Renoir and Orson Welles, and cinema’s basis in
photography, film has been thought to express truths about the world by preserving and
recapitulating the spatiotemporal relationships that seem to structure the world itself: one thing
behind another, one moment merging into the next.52 In a different tradition, however, associated
with theories of montage and shock, the dialectical aesthetics of Dziga Vertov and Sergei
Eisenstein, and cinema’s status as an aesthetic construct, film has also been thought capable of
These conventions are epitomized in the “Ken Burns effect,” in which a static, photographic
image of the past is accessed from a present aligned with cinema’s moving image and mobile
perspective.
52
See André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is Cinema?, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1:23–40. It is worth asking how 3D effects and “deep focus” relate, especially given that Bazin writes about depth of field in 1953,
the year of the 3-D Hollywood films previously mentioned in this essay.
51
31
revitalizing our contact with the real by intervening to recondition ideological and perceptual
habits.53
In a recent article on Jacobs’s digital work, Malcolm Turvey offers the terms realist and
modernist to describe this schematic opposition between investing in cinema’s powers either to
“reproduce reality” or to “transform reality.”54 He claims that Jacobs takes a middle course,
identifying him with a “revelationist” tendency that embraces cinema’s potential to both
reproduce and to transform. Moreover, he sees Jacobs’s digital work as carrying this revelationist
tradition forward from cinema into new media.55 Though Turvey’s concept of revelationism
seeks a middle course, his mode of argument takes up the “realist” view as it is recast in theories
of new media. To ground his claim for continuity between the cinematic and digital, Turvey
argues that the indexical and evidentiary qualities conventionally associated with photography,
and thought to ground cinema’s privileged relationship with the real, still obtain in the case of
digital imaging technologies. He points, for example, to Matthew Kirchenbaum’s “forensic”
approach, which casts digital hardware as a reimagined crime scene in which data leave traces.56
Notions of the indexical and evidentiary traditionally associated with photography once
prompted Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin to identify photographic media with a
53
I am thinking in particular of Walter Benjamin’s theorization of shock by way of Charles
Baudelaire and Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of montage. See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form:
Essays in Film Theory, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1949); Walter
Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard
Eiland and Michael William Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006), 313–355.
54
Turvey, “Ken Jacobs,” 108.
55
Ibid., 124. Turvey’s identification of Dziga Vertov with the “revelationist” tendency offers a
different path from Vertov to digital media than the “database aesthetic” that Lev Manovich
traced back to Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). See Lev Manovich, The
Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
56
Matthew Kirchenbaum, Mechamisns: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2007).
32
“historicism” and consumerism that imagined grasping, collecting, retaining, and replaying
presence by way of photographic proxy.57 Jacobs invokes this discourse by claiming that he
hopes to “touch” the past through working with found footage. The contact he imagines,
however, departs from any idea of storage and retrieval: “It’s shocking how things come and go.
Can you imagine someone living in a constant state of shock? Each moment is dissolving into
another permutation of itself. . . . To touch the past is just imperative to me. . . . I’m very aware
that these are not just shots, these are things, life, that happened in front of the camera. I’m very
interested in getting to that moment.”58 The touch Jacobs describes here is not an attempt to
grasp, through photographic arrest or cinematic reanimation, a reality that once impressed itself
in celluloid. To touch the past is imagined as a way of “getting to that moment” that is nothing
but that moment’s disappearance.
Swerving from the realist rubric of indexicality to the modernist vocabulary of shock,
Jacobs relates cinematic time to the sense of a passing present. His insistence that a film is not
made up of “just shots” but of “things, life, that happened in front of the camera” echoes
Kracauer’s and Bazin’s “realist” claims about the phenomenology of cinema. Describing his
work with found footage, Jacobs also echoes the affect of their claims, claiming, “I love what’s
there. I love what I see.”59 His invocation of shock, however, draws squarely on the modernist
tradition and, in that vein, focuses on dialectical possibilities of juxtaposition and collision.
Perceiving discrete moments as “permutations” of one another relates a cinematic effect with a
57
See Benjamin, “Work of Art”; Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament:
Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47–64;
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 389–400.
58
Julie Hampton, “An Interview with Ken Jacobs,” Millennium Film Journal, nos. 32–33 (1998),
http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ32%2C33/hampton.htm.
59
Ibid.
33
more radical contingency. Bridging the implications of realist and montage aesthetics, it
associates the dissolving and blending of images in cinematic experience with the unstable
perceptual conditions of experience itself.
Jacobs’s engagement with depth as both a perceptual and formal possibility complicates
any assumed opposition between engaging cinema as a sensory world or as a semiotic
articulation. Approaching depth as a means correlating dimensions of cinematic and lived
experience, he is not far from the commitments that ground Bazin’s celebration of “depth of
field.”60 Jacobs also aligns, however, with the modernist tradition of Vertov and Eisenstein by
dissociating depth from the verisimilitude of represented space and considering it more abstractly
through dialectical and structural relationships that shuffle patterns of space and time.
Jacobs’s brand of realism rejects the nostalgia often associated with cinema’s indexical or
photographic specificity. For Jacobs, a cinematic image does not disclose a past reality as much
as expose the present to its own passing: “I feel it’s enough for me, for ourselves in our moment
to see what the truth of our transience and vulnerability is. That it’s one transience looking at
another transience and being able to see a kind of reflection of itself and to feel for that state of
transience. For one transient moment to feel for another transient moment.”61 Jacobs’s idea of
transience recalls Barthes’s poignant suggestion that the past glimpsed in a photograph offers a
chance to recognize the precariousness of the present.62 Rather than eliding two historical
moments by bringing the past to life, this “reflection” takes place across a gap; their difference in
time is precisely what exposes the connection between these moments, as they share the
impermanence this difference marks. This formulation recasts the spatiotemporal depth that
60
Bazin, “Evolution of the Language of Cinema.”
61
Ibid.
62
Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96–97.
34
Jacobs explored between two film frames or a pair of stereo photographs as a depth of historicity
in which separate moments are held together in the disjunct simultaneity of their mutual
contingency. Like the depth he learned to admire in abstract paintings, historical perspective
appears here as the dynamic and dimensional relationship that the cinematic may perform as
entirely evanescent, as painted air.
The encounter Jacobs describes resonates with the alternative Walter Benjamin poses to
the historicist’s way of seeing. Rather than presenting “the ‘eternal’ image of the past,” this
perspective “supplies a unique experience with the past” and exposes the present as something
other than merely a “transition” to the future.63 It mutually orients past and present toward a
moment of interpretation: “every now is the now of a specific recognizability. In truth, it is
loaded to the bursting point with time. . . . It isn’t that the past casts its light on the present or that
what is present casts its light on what is past; rather, an image is that in which the Then and Now
come together; in a flash of lightning, into a constellation.”64 To see this constellation is an effort
aimed less at a truth than at an unrealized possibility. Benjamin describes it as an attempt to
“rescue . . . what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost.”65 Barthes saw this as the way
his own death called out to him in the faces of people in old photographs, as the knowledge his
future would be lost as theirs already was. Benjamin extends this invocation beyond the scale
and stakes of personal history to that of history itself.
The dialectical view Benjamin describes echoes what Jacobs saw in abstract painting,
explored in Festoon, and figured in the eternalism effect: differences are held together to produce
a simultaneity-in-depth. In reworking the doubled images of stereographs, in crossing effects of
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396, 395–396.
64
Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 64.
65
Benjamin, Arcades Project, 473.
63
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spatial depth and cinematic time, and in digitally extending paracinematic strategies, the
Capitalism films enact compound views. They hold two perspectives together in tension to
produce an unstable depth of presence and historicity. Rather than overlapping with one another
in a virtual equivalence, or each constituting a discrete moment in a series “stacked” from then to
now, their relationship is produced as a constant fluctuation, a dynamic and tense equilibrium.
This challenges our desire to see either a progression, repetition, or break between the old and
new. It enacts the difficulty of orienting ourselves within historical and material relationships
that are constantly in flux and refuse to quite cohere as spectacles we could grasp, store, or
retrieve.
Drama of a Tottering Pretense. Twentieth century film theory that looked back to photography
may offer resources for rethinking cinema in an era of digital media. Turvey’s paradigm—a
binary of “recording” or “transforming” sublated in “revelationism”—is haunted by Siegfried
Kracauer’s slightly different argument that film’s “redemptive” potential results from both its
capacities for “recording” and “revealing.”66 Kracauer argued that film could “adjust our vision
to our actual situation” by “blasting the prison of conventional reality”68 His metaphor echoes
Walter Benjamin’s well-known claim that—with the speed of its photographic frames—film
“burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second.”69 But to adjust vision
or jailbreak perception is not necessarily to record or to reveal reality’s true image. In fact, in a
passage that resonates with the aesthetics of Jacobs’s work, Benjamin described cinema as
Kracauer, Theory of Film. On “recording,” “revealing,” the “redemptive,” and on film’s
“realist” and “formalist” “tendencies” see, especially p27-59, 300-312.
68
Ibid., 15, 48.
69
Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 265.
66
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“disclos[ing] quite unknown aspects” through altering scales of space and time, “disrupting and
isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence.”70 Benjamin’s idea of recording and revealing
invokes the mystery of photographic motion studies that fed into cinema’s invention: “we have
no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step.”71
Using digital software to horizontally juxtapose photographic stills into illusions of depth
and motion, Jacobs’s Capitalism films revisit the strategy of early motion studies.72 Jacobs has
announced this as his intention, pronouncing that “advanced filmmaking leads to Muybridge.” 73
Interpreted along realist or modernist lines, this could mean that advanced cinema returns to
photography or transforms our view of reality. But Jacobs’s directive warps the very idea of
advancement by suggesting progress might point backward in time and that the evolution of film
as a medium might loop back through what is commonly seen as its beginning. In Muybridge,
Jacobs finds a nexus of questions that extends from before the invention of photography through
today’s purportedly postphotographic and postcinematic moment. Focusing on how images can
combine to conjure different dimensions of spatiotemporal relationship, Jacobs creates
“time/motion studies” that, like Muybridge's photographic series, both make use of and disrupt
conventions of seeing and representing.
Muybridge’s photographic series provoke ideas of synthesis without cohering quite
enough to accomplish a seamless simulation. Even as movement and change is imagined to
subtend them as a series, the individual photographs of a motion study remain discrete and the
Ibid., 266.
71
Ibid. Of course, the “person” was preceded by a horse in Muybridge’s experiments.
72
Some of Muybridge’s motion studies also involved spatial rather than temporal shifts in
perspective. See Brooke Belisle, “The Dimensional Image: Overlaps between Stereographic,
Cinematic, and Digital Depth” in Film Criticism 37–38, nos. 3–1 (2013): 117–137.
73
This phrase may first appear in print in Films That Tell Time, but even there Jacobs is quoting
a prior statement.
70
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gaps between them remain visible. Although Muybridge’s photographs were celebrated as
refuting painterly conceits and capturing the true postures of motion, he creatively arranged
images out of the spatiotemporal order of their capture to construct visual narratives.74 The
“indexical” status of his early moving images was also tenuous, as photographs were adapted
into drawings and animated into unsteady loops.75 Invoking Muybridge, Jacobs turns away from
questions of medium specificity and indexicality to consider how different techniques of
spatiotemporal framing and juxtaposition structure different relationships of truth and illusion,
stillness and motion, flatness and depth. His work examines how the static, flat, and singular
image can be multiplied and galvanized into a broad spectrum of visual effects that are reduced
and codified into patterns of medium specificity according to principles that also reduce and
codify perception per se, and shift interlocking terms of reality and representation.
Jacobs describes cinema’s relationship with the real by using a phrase that recalls how
motion studies hover between integration and dissolution: the “drama of a tottering pretense.” 76
This notion attends to ways that cinema performs its own instability, “playing,” as he puts it, “on
the margin of illusion and its imminent collapse into evident means.”77 The paradox expressed in
cinema’s coincidence of illusion and evident means rejects the idea that an actual stability and
coherence waits to be discovered, if only perception and representation could be perfected;
instead, the drama of discovery plays out at a shifting margin of illusion and collapse. For
Jacobs, cinema always inhabits this margin, though we may fail, and even willfully fail, to
notice. In the way his films play on this margin and produce this margin as a site of play, Jacobs
On the gendered narratives of some motion studies, see Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
75
Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge (Reaktion Books, 2010).
76
Jacobs, “Painted Air.”
77
Ibid.
74
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both invests and explodes the construct of cinematic experience. Engaging film as the “drama of
a tottering pretense,” he suggests that film analogizes the drama of perception, that the ways we
invest cinema’s perceptual realism resonate with ways we believe the world itself coheres and
ways we imaginatively integrate it.
Depth and the idea of depth readings animate Jacobs’s long-standing interest in how the
drama of perception plays out. Sitting with me in a coffee shop, he touched a shiny metal divider
that reflected back a bent image of his finger and then drew my attention far across the room to
where doughnuts were lined up on shelves in rows of Os. He talked about the complex
relationships between what exists to be seen and what we experience as seeing. He described his
correlated exploration of perceptual and aesthetic possibilities as an effort to shake off the
“insanity” of reductivist views that limit what we see and what we assume, what we believe and
what we attempt.78
Jacobs often talks about the way he has consciously developed and extended his own
ability to visually perceive depth. In an interview he once elaborated: “When you see threedimensionally, things have weight. . . . There really is a volume, and things connect to things. . . .
I remember strange moments when I could almost feel something stretch in my head . . . and
suddenly I’d see depth where I only had an idea of a somewhere before. I could see the open
space itself, the air contained between things. . . . I was suddenly able to grasp and encompass
the distance between myself and a lamp post in the distance.”79 This idea of depth emphasizes
connection across difference. It recalls Jacobs’s idea of depth readings and looking between film
frames to imagine a way of encountering the dimensions that open in and as the gaps our grasp
might otherwise eclipse.
Ken and Flo Jacobs, in discussion with the author, January 21, 2013.
79
Jacobs, “Interview with Ken Jacobs,” 32.
78
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Jacobs’s approach to depth may open a different angle on the slippery notion Walter
Benjamin approached as “aura,” associating auratic perception with the dialectical quality
Benjamin ascribed to historical perception. In his essay on mechanical reproduction, Benjamin
defines aura as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”80 He describes the
auratic encounter as an embodied perception of closeness-at-a-distance: “To follow with the
eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that
casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.”81 This
is a mode of seeing that touches and discloses across a distance rather than closing in, relating
perceiver and perceived in complex co-presence.
Benjamin associated the “destruction” of aura with a violent desire “to ‘get closer’ to
things” and “to get hold” of them, and he implicated photography and cinema with this
compulsion.82 Before his writing, a desire to get closer and get hold of by way of representation
was also overtly discussed in reference to the depth effect of nineteenth-century stereographic
photography, and today it is again invoked in discussions of cinematic and digital 3-D.83 But the
dimensional relationships that Benjamin identifies with aura propose a different possibility of
depth, a depth perception that sidesteps the anti-auratic accusations attending mechanical
reproduction from stereograph to cinema and today’s digital spectacles.
80
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second
Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,
vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) 104–105.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
83
Jonathan Crary in Techniques also makes this connection between the stereoscope and
Benjamin’s claims about aura. On stereographic images, see, e.g., Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The
Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” in Photography: Essays and Images, ed. Beaumont Newhall
(1859; New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980), 60. On contemporary 3-D, see, e.g., the
online description of IMAX 3-D, at http://www.imax.com/about/experience/3d/.
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Depth, as Jacobs explores it, concerns something other than the three-dimensional
appearance of objects, the measurable or optical coordinates that a stereographic or cinematic
image might attempt to recapitulate. It remembers the radical relationality that stereoscopic and
cinematic representation presume as their underlying premise. Namely, the difference between
what our two eyes see is rendered as the depth of a world in which we are included; that the
difference produced by distinguishing between moments traces the moving signature of
presence. Staging depth as a dimension of seeing rather than something to be seen moves away
from problems of indexicality or versimilitude that have focused on the spatiotemporal
materiality of the image as an object in itself. Rather than grasping at the objective shape of
reality or asking how perfectly a representation recapitulates this reality, this concept of depth
grapples with the spatiotemporal context of seeing and the irreducibly relational, dynamic
structure of presence and appearance. It engages depth as Maurice Merleau-Ponty theorized it, as
a coexistence in time and space that contours every perceptual encounter, “a voluminosity we
express in a word when we say that a thing is there.”84
Jacobs’s approach to depth provokes unusual ways of seeing. At a recent screening for art
students, he began by showing slides of paintings, pointing out how the relative size of drips of
paint—flecks that appeared accidental—suggested planes of depth in which surface strokes
popped into dimensional figures.85 Watching Capitalism: Child Labor immediately afterward,
the flickering scratches and grainy effects of old, paper photographs appeared as something other
than the authentic trace of the past, the visual noise of an old medium, or the nostalgic
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader:
Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1993), 140.
85
Ken Jacobs (School of Visual Art, New York, March 20, 2013). Thank you to Charles Traub
for inviting me to attend.
84
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recapitulation of the analog. These dynamic imperfections seemed to activate and animate
volume within the image, floating like flecks of snow closer and farther away in a space they
conjured.
Jacobs’s work asks us to engage as interpreters of an ongoing drama that teeters between
coherence and collapse, choosing the terms that will organize its “tottering pretense.” Rather
than using strategies of representation to produce or shore up a virtual reality, or promulgating
incoherence as an aesthetic in itself, it challenges us to consider how we actively invest
experience with legibility and significance. It considers what is as stake in how relationships of
presence are continually imagined, in how spatiotemporal distance and difference appear
ordered, in the mutual contingency of anchor and horizon. It challenges conventions that not only
construct cinematic spectacle but also orient mutable relationships of here and there, now and
then, seer and seen.’
I thank Ken and Flo Jacobs for their time, assistance, and permission to reprint images. I am
indebted to Jeffrey Skoller and D. N. Rodowick for exchanging drafts as we learned we were all
writing on Jacobs, and for feedback from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference,
from the Berkeley Visual Cultures Working Group, and especially from Linda Williams. Thanks
also to Electronic Arts Intermix, Anthology Film Archives, and the Berkeley Art Museum.
Author Bio: Brooke Belisle is an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow
and visiting assistant professor in cultural analysis and theory at Stony Brook University. Her
work explores hybrid, emergent, and experimental media formats across the history of visual
culture.
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