# P. Adams Sitney (2011) *The Ultimate Ken Jacobs*. : . > [!INFO] > Type:: [[]] > Title:: The Ultimate Ken Jacobs > Author(s): [[P. Adams Sitney]] > Year:: 2011 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: sitney_ultimate_2011 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: The Ultimate Ken Jacobs](zotero://select/items/@sitney_ultimate_2011) > ReviewedDate:: [[2024-02-23]] ## Citation ```latex [@sitney_ultimate_2011] ``` ## Summary ## Annotation # THE ULTIMATE KEN JACOBS By [P. Adams Sitney](https://www.artforum.com/author/p-adams-sitney/)  **Still from the 16-mm film component of Ken Jacobs’s Nervous System performance _XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX_, 1980**, approx. 90 minutes. **현재 뉴욕에서 활동하는 중견 아방가르드 영화 제작자** 중 가장 눈에 띄는 세 사람은 최근 몇 년 동안 괄목할 만한 성과를 거두었습니다. 조나스 메카스(1922년생), 켄 제이콥스(1933년생), 어니 게르(1943년생)는 기관 소속에서 벗어나-제이콥스와 게르는 교수직에서 은퇴했고, 메카스는 앤솔로지 필름 아카이브의 일상적인 운영을 포기했으며, 16mm에서 디지털 영화 제작으로 전환한 것이 그들의 생산적인 에너지의 일부가 될 수 있습니다. 셀룰로이드 작업의 경제적, 기술적 어려움을 극복하며 살아온 삶이 디지털 작업을 매우 효율적으로 진행할 수 있도록 준비해 준 셈입니다. 메카스와 게르는 영화 외에도 비디오 설치 작품을 전시하고 있으며, 제이콥스는 수십 년 동안 해온 파라시네마 공연에 대한 헌신을 다시 한 번 되새기고 있습니다. 올 봄에 _광학 장난: 켄 제이콥스의 영화 [[@pierson_optic_2011|광학 장난: 켄 제이콥스의 놀라운 영화(2011)]]_(미셸 피어슨, 데이비드 E. 제임스, 고 폴 아서 편집, 옥스퍼드 대학 출판부)가 출간되면서 영화감독의 업적에 대한 최초의 책으로, 우리는 70년에 걸쳐 큰 영향을 미친 제이콥스의 경력에 새롭게 주목해야 할 필요성을 느끼게 되었습니다. 그가 선택한 매체에 대한 그의 참여는 세기 중반에 시작되었지만 그의 활동은 가속화될 조짐을 보이고 있습니다. 사실, 은퇴와 디지털 기술의 수용은 제이콥스의 특별한 예술적 생산의 세 번째 단계의 시작에 불과합니다. The initial (and shortest) phase, of approximately a dozen years, established Jacobs’s reputation as a filmmaker. Inflamed with resentment at the establishments of the late 1950s—in politics, the art world, and even the avant-garde cinema—he rapidly fashioned a strikingly original approach to film form, from the series of largely short, formally eccentric films he made with Jack Smith in the latter half of that decade to his most famous work, the structural film _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_, of 1969/1971. As Jacobs told critic Scott MacDonald (in an interview published in MacDonald’s _A Critical Cinema 3_ [1998]), “Form is only interesting to the extent that it verges on formlessness, to the extent that it challenges incoherence.” Although his combative personality and his uncompromising work might have positioned Jacobs as the ultimate outsider filmmaker, his historical timing was perfect: He quickly became a central presence in what Jonas Mekas promoted as the New American Cinema. Charismatic and indefatigable, he entered the second phase of his career as the most influential of a new generation of teachers of filmmaking and film aesthetics. His students from the State University of New York, Binghamton, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in 2002, founded, and initially perpetuated his ideas and idiosyncratic tastes through, the Collective for Living Cinema (1973–92) with him as its éminence grise. During most of his years at SUNY, Jacobs concentrated on performances of the Nervous System, a movable three-dimensional projection apparatus, by means of which he “discovered” dazzling wonders hidden in fragments of old films. Through the optical stuttering of his jerry-rigged machinery, he mined intricate variations on illusionary movements and pictorial depth teased from footage culled from film archives, creating the most impressive paracinematic works we have ever seen. Then, in his third phase, he turned to digital reproduction to complete two long films that had remained unfinished for decades. Exhilarated and revitalized by the technology, he recorded many of his Nervous System performances while embarking on new productions—now exclusively in digital video—with hitherto unmatched energy. These are, at any rate, the broad outlines of the history so thoroughly examined in Pierson, James, and Arthur’s extraordinary volume of writings devoted to all aspects of Jacobs’s work, which they have approached with great avidity and even devotion. Consequently, _Optic Antics_ has the tone of a Festschrift. Still, the bulk of this splendid book is analytical when it is not reverential. And, it should be said, the reverence is quite genuine, for Jacobs has always been a man of infectious enthusiasms, astonishing generosity, and extraordinary insight, despite his sometimes choleric and bellicose eruptions and his often domineering personality. James, for instance, puts his finger on the contradictory nature of Jacobs’s persona when (in his essay “_The Sky Socialist_: Film as an Instrument of Thought, Cinema as an Augury of Redemption”) he extols “the constitutive necessity of failure” in Jacobs’s oeuvre thus: “And whatever its source in Jacobs’ libidinal economy, his commitment to failure—his refusal of mastery, perfection, and control, and his insistence on rejectamenta, breakdown, and ephemerality—reflects an objective political condition, the obsessive recurrence to which marks him as one of the most important artists of the period of late capitalism.” Yet astute readers will glimpse allusions to Jacobs’s challenging personality in the essay by his longtime colleague Larry Gottheim, the filmmaker who brought him to teach at SUNY-Binghamton (“Bigger than Life: Between Ken Jacobs and Nicholas Ray”), and in Scott MacDonald’s account of the filmmaker’s provocations and explosions at a convocation of staid documentarians and film librarians (“Ken Jacobs and the Robert Flaherty Seminar”).  **Ken and Flo Jacobs at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, New York, 2011.** Writing on Jacobs as a teacher (in an essay aptly titled “Professor Ken”), Michael Zryd describes the filmmaker as if he were a Stoic sage coaxing his students into becoming themselves. “The meaning of personality oscillates between a kind of essential character (‘who you are’) and a notion of potential that needed to be activated through the transformative pedagogical experience (‘come into your personhood’),” Zryd speculates. “Jacobs recognizes this as central to his mission as a teacher: ‘I wasn’t the ideal teacher, but I was the ultimate Ken Jacobs.’” Zryd locates Jacobs among a small company of the filmmaker’s greatest contemporaries in the avant-garde cinema—all electrifying, autodidactic professors without college educations. “Un-school people,” Jacobs himself called them, adding, “I have to say that none of us were proud of it, we felt ashamed of our lack of education.” Naturally, then, the filmmaker might not have realized that he was following in the line of the great Stoic philosophers, who taught by the example of their lives; nor does he or Zryd mention the primary native example of the species, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has been the pervasive model of the American “scholar” or artist-as-public-theoretician. Nevertheless, with Jacobs’s retirement from SUNY in 2002, the last of the larger-than-life sages of avant-garde cinema of his generation departed from the stage of institutional instruction. Zryd’s essay is typical of the laudatory tenor of _Optic Antics_; only in the volume’s posthumous publication of excerpts from Paul Arthur’s remarkable diary, in which for decades he recorded his impressions of every film he saw, do we come across any reservations whatsoever about the filmmaker’s accomplishments. Arthur’s reaction to the second performance of _New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903_, 1993, that he saw in 1995 is no doubt the harshest criticism in the book: “A lesser performance fronted by the self-indulgent ‘Part One’ in which Ken projects the footage totally out of focus in a slow pulse while he stands in front of [the] projector using a piece of paper with a hole (to form an iris) and his body edges (hands, arms, side) to reshape the screen and point to certain sections. The Jauniaux score seemed overwrought and heavy this time. . . .” Yet he had lavishly praised the piece when he first saw a performance of it three months earlier: “One of the most elegant conceits for the movement of history I have ever seen; better than the trains of the Soviets or Lanzmann’s _Shoah_ for that matter, the long walk up the hill in _Young Mr. Lincoln_ and maybe the unspooling of film in Godard’s _Histoire(s) du cinéma_.” The disparity between Arthur’s two responses to _New York Ghetto Fishmarket_ reflects Jacobs’s restless compulsion for invention, even at the risk of sabotaging his achievements, rather than the changing humors of the critic. Arthur was profoundly sympathetic to Jacobs’s project; Jacobs, however, has been the enemy of any attempt to stabilize even his own masterpieces. Jacobs had been a painter before becoming a filmmaker, and many of the contributors to _Optic Antics_ refer to the lasting influence of Hans Hofmann, with whom he studied at the Art Students League in the 1950s. In every phase of his career, the filmmaker retained an eye for elegant and intricate compositions. But periodically the energies of his Abstract Expressionist training would be turned against that very elegance. The earliest film works that Jacobs still exhibits come from the late ’50s, when he befriended Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner, with whom he shared his aspirations and fantasies for the medium. They appear in his initial works, along with Jerry Sims, an indigent artist whom he met through Smith and whom he cast in the role of “Suffering,” opposite Smith himself as “The Spirit Not of Life but of Living,” in _Star Spangled to Death_. He shot most of the film in 16 mm between 1956 and 1960 and ultimately released it as a 440-minute-long video on DVD in 2004. Even though he intuited from the beginning that it would be a long and complex film, he believed for at least a decade after he initiated the project that he was on the verge of completing it. Instead, his remarkably successful career as a teacher was launched from the numerous works of apparently lesser ambition that he had made to divert or restore himself from this nearly interminable project. Yet very often these works, too, reflected the conflicting energies that stymied the epic film. According to Arthur, Jacobs’s “incomparable cinematic career—embracing shadow plays, double-screen films, and projected performance pieces as well as (un)conventional movies—has been marked by, perhaps even consecrated to, a movement of fits and starts, breakdowns and resurrections, accidents blossoming into critical knowledge.”  **Ken Jaocbs, _Blonde Cobra_, 1959–63,** stills from a black-and-white and color film in 16 mm, 33 minutes. Thus, he made _Little Stabs at Happiness_ (ca. 1958–63) as “a true breather” to escape the tyranny of _Star Spangled to Death_. Mekas saw it at an open-house screening he organized at the Charles Theatre on Avenue B in New York and proclaimed it a masterpiece of the New American Cinema. He also found money for Jacobs to print distribution copies of the film for the fledgling Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Shortly thereafter, Jacobs exhibited _Blonde Cobra_ (1959–63), which he made using footage Fleischner had shot with Smith and Sims, interspersing its fragmentary scenes with long audio monologues Smith had improvised on tape; the screen goes black while Smith ruminates. Picking up on a quotation Smith uttered (‘Life swarms with innocent monsters’—Charles Baudelaire”), Mekas proclaimed Jacobs and Smith the forerunners of a new “Baudelairean cinema.” Jacobs returned the compliment by making _Baud’lairian Capers (A Musical with Nazis and Jews)_ (1963). Although Smith found _Blonde Cobra_ too dark and began to distance himself from Jacobs, it was that film and _Little Stabs at Happiness_ that first drew attention to him in the avant-garde film community. But within a year, Smith made _Flaming Creatures_ (1963), which established his enduring reputation, partially eclipsing that of Jacobs. Soon after, their relations were permanently severed. In an almost diaristic essay titled “Nervous Ken: _XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX_ and After,” filmmaker Phil Solomon, formerly a student of Jacobs’s, points accurately to the centrality of _Little Stabs at Happiness_ in his teacher’s enterprise. He draws attention to the moment on the sound track when the filmmaker ironically announces that, having just listened to the text he improvised (which we have just heard), he finds it suitable because it is “vague.” Solomon concludes: “It is in the gap of that moment, that crack in time, that an uncanny and knowing sense of a spatio/temporal displacement, an unbridgeable ellipse begins to tremor and reverberate. . . . Oscillating between what was and what is, there exists the precarious thin ice sense of ‘presence’ in all cinema—time becomes plastic and malleable, a moment can become lost, then found.” _Little Stabs at Happiness_’s lost moment, in fact, entails a confession of friendship gone astray. Similar disjunctions at the heart of Jacobs’s best work, all through his career, indicate that trauma has been a primary generator of his imagination. The “gap” Solomon eloquently describes in _Little Stabs at Happiness_ is a mild instance of that trauma, inflected by a sense of nostalgia, as it often is in Jacobs’s work. A more violent version occurs in one of the imageless passages of _Blonde Cobra_, as Smith is ruminating about a “lonely little boy” wandering through the house calling for his mother. He suddenly shifts from third to first person with a traumatic termination of the long auditory interlude: “The lonely little boy was less than seven; I know that because we didn’t leave Columbus until I was seven. I know it, I was under seven and I took a match and I lit it and I pulled out the other little boy’s penis and I burnt his penis with a match!” Here, Jacobs underlines the coincidence of the eruption of the first-person voice with grotesque violence, by cutting suddenly from the story told in blackness to another of the fragmentary narratives Fleischner had filmed and abandoned. The theme of trauma became an explicit aspect of Jacobs’s cinema when he superseded the stagnating _Star Spangled to Death_ with yet another epic, _The Sky Socialist_. He shot it on 8 mm in 1964 and 1968 (but it, too, languished, until 1988, when it was finally completed and released). It is a fantasy centered on the image of the Brooklyn Bridge, in which Flo Jacobs, the filmmaker’s wife and collaborator, plays an imaginary Anne Frank, who has been miraculously spared from the Holocaust to marry Isadore Lhevinne, an obscure novelist and linguist whose work Jacobs discovered while prowling used book shops. David James (in his essay cited above) provides superb glosses on the genesis of the film and its characters. _The Sky Socialist_ is a formally elegant work lacking the anarchic energy Smith provided Jacobs’s earlier films. After shooting it, Jacobs stopped working with actors. The loss of his relationship with Smith might be seen as yet another traumatic impetus to his invention; for after a series of impressive short lyrics (_Lisa and Joey in Connecticut, January ’65: “You’ve Come Back!” “You’re Still Here!”_ [1965], _Airshaft_ [1967], _Soft Rain_ [1968], _Nissan Ariana Window_ [1968]), he made _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_, which marked the turning point of his career. One of those lyrics forecasts the formal invention of _Tom, Tom_. For _Soft Rain_, Jacobs trained the camera on his loft window looking down on a rooftop and, beyond it, on Reade Street in Lower Manhattan, having affixed a black paper rectangle to the glass. As he said in a note about the film (originally published in the _Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue_ and quoted in _Optic Antics_), “Though [the cutout] clearly if slightly overlaps the two receding loft building walls[,] the mind, while knowing better, insists on presuming it to be overlapped by them. . . . The contradiction of 2D reality versus 3D implication is assumingly and mysteriously explicit.” He shot three and a half minutes of film and reproduced the whole roll three times in the film, slowing it from twenty-four frames per second to eighteen in projection. Eventually, the perceptive viewer can confirm that the roll is repeated by memorizing the sequence of pedestrians or of cars. More than any other work, _Soft Rain_ demonstrates the lessons Jacobs learned from Hofmann and exemplifies the filmmaker’s natural talent as a formalist, against which he so often struggles (in what Arthur and James have called his pursuit of “failure”). _Soft Rain_ crystallizes the intimacy between beauty and illusion that he loves and rediscovers again and again in overlooked places. As he implied in a letter of April 2006 to Nicole Brenez (quoted in her essay “Recycling, Visual Study, Expanded Theory—Ken Jacobs, Theorist, or the Long Song of the _Sons_”), our survival as creatures “with two adjacent eyes” grounds his cinema:  **Ken Jaocbs, _Blonde Cobra_, 1959–63,** stills from a black-and-white and color film in 16 mm, 33 minutes. _The serious avant-garde is less concerned with subject matter than with existential process: what is it to know the world via our senses and the tools we use to feed those senses? We fool ourselves consciously, to ward off being duped by the particular mechanisms nature has provided humans. Frog eyes, so different from our own and reporting to frog brains so different a picturing of the world, seem to work fine for frogs; think of frog tongues flicking out and catching dinner on the fly._ The wit and verve of Jacobs’s letters makes us regret that there is not more of his own writing in _Optic Antics_. In compensation, however, there is a lengthy, illuminating interview with Flo Jacobs by Amy Taubin (drolly titled “Flo Talks!”). The late 1960s were not only productive years for Jacobs as a filmmaker; it was then that he began to demonstrate his considerable didactic and administrative aptitudes, although he characteristically made that flair problematic, with his ineluctable resistance to institutional decorum. In 1966, he secured a position as the initial director of the Millennium Film Workshop, then in the Second Avenue Courthouse (now home to Anthology Film Archives). St. Mark’s Church and the New School administered the project through a federal antipoverty program. Jacobs’s visionary plan for Millennium made equipment and working space available to all comers. But he clashed with the board of directors, who dismissed him in 1968, leaving traumatic scars and lasting resentment. Nevertheless, he was soon able to get a part-time teaching post at St. John’s University in New York, and then, in 1969, a full-time position at SUNY-Binghamton, which soon became tenured. At the time, it was the best-paid and most prestigious academic appointment an avant-garde filmmaker in the republic could secure. Jacobs’s teaching positions allowed him to explore his lifelong fascination with the overlooked arenas of cinema. He had earlier discovered the Kuchar brothers at an amateur film club and brought them to the attention of Mekas. At St. John’s he shared with his students the wonders of cinema’s first decade and a half. Among the films of that era preserved in the Library of Congress’s Paper Print Collection, he discovered a “primitive” work based on the children’s rhyme “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son,” reputed to have been made by the legendary cameraman Billy Bitzer. Soon he translated his art-historical appreciation of the details of that ten-minute film into his own 115-minute opus. In his hands, the 1905 original, repeated twice in full—at the start and near the end of the film—opens into an exploration of film grain, projector stutterings, the ghostly vestiges of anonymous actors, the elemental syntax of cinematic narrative: in essence, an ontology of cinema itself. In his obsessive need to break down forms and genres, Jacobs even interrupts the black-and-white variations with color images from a shadow play. The nostalgic veneer of primitive film clearly appealed to the filmmaker’s fascination with lost time, while the manipulations of his homemade optical printer permitted him to replace the estranged Jack Smith with presumably dead actors, resurrected in a mechanical Saint Vitus’ dance. In _Optic Antics_, Brenez brilliantly expostulates on the radical fusion of the “inconceivable movements[,] . . . _figural intervals_[, and] the profoundly _unformed_ nature of the cinematic imprint” within the film. “This,” she writes, “is what Jacobs, with his total kinetic materialism, elaborates: he presumes to identify and demonstrate what is unformed and unreadable, to rework what is problematic, what is possible, and what is taken for granted in the name of symbolic representation.” _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_ pointed the way to a new opening for Jacobs, one in which he could combine his cinematic enterprise with his work in performance. Before his final rupture with Smith, the two had, in 1961, briefly staged what they called “The Human Wreckage Revue” in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Mekas mounted the Expanded Cinema Festival in 1965 at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, Jacobs created a shadow play, _THE BIG BLACKOUT OF ’65: Chapter One “Thirties Man”_ (while Smith staged his _Rehearsal for the Destruction of Atlantis_). Over the next three years, Jacobs added three more “chapters” to his shadow play. Then, throughout the ’70s, he concentrated on three-dimensional shadow plays using color-filtering glasses. By 1980, he had adapted a propeller mechanism of Swiss multimedia artist Alfons Schilling’s invention—an “exterior, revolving shutter,” as Jacobs calls it—through which he could project images from two nearly synchronous projectors, with easily manipulable speeds, thereby producing spectacular three-dimensional illusions without the need for special glasses. This became the mechanical basis for the performances he and his wife had been conducting, (under the rubric “The Nervous System”) since 1975, when they first experimented with 3-D.  **Ken Jacobs, _Lisa and Joey in Connecticut, January 65: “You’ve Come Back!” You’re Still Here!_,” 1965,** stills from a color film in 8 mm transferred to 16 mm, 18 minutes. In his essay “Ken Jacobs and Ecstatic Abstraction,” filmmaker Lewis Klahr recognizes the affinity of the Nervous System works, which for the most part used parallel prints of old films, to _Tom, Tom_: “Only a handful of [the Nervous System works] offer the kind of directness found in _Tom, Tom_,” Klahr observes. “But Jacobs had discovered something more important: an approach to extend the language of _Tom, Tom_’s sublime cinematic history lesson into an ongoing realm of improvisatory abstraction. He had discovered a way to move forward around the formidable roadblock of his own masterpiece and refine the subtlety of his ecstatic seeing.” The dramatist Richard Foreman is even more unqualified in his estimation of Jacobs’s achievement in these performances: “These ‘Nervous System’ works,” Foreman writes in “Ken Jacobs, Moralist,” _fulfill the century-long dream of many artists of different disciplines to uncover a “second reality” behind or between the elements of the world as “seen.” . . . I maintain that for Jacobs this also has been a multi-year project, driven and sustained by the moral need to open oneself to the reality behind (or within) the reality of the lived world, and to discover a realm where the lived world is “cleansed” of its lies and hypocrisies as it opens to the vibrations of an energy that can never be co-opted into behavior that would in any way mislead or imprison his fellow man._ Undoubtedly, Jacobs found in the Nervous System an automatism evoking wondrous possibilities that would sustain him for three decades. Here, yet again, I refer to a crucial passage in Emerson’s _Nature_ (1836) that I take to be central to the aesthetic of the American avant-garde cinema. If we were to substitute “three-dimensional projection” for “coach” and “camera obscura” in Emerson’s passage, we might be reading about the Nervous System: _Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position apprizes us of a dualism. . . . The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women,—talking, running, bartering, fighting,—the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the rail-road car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the figure of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years! . . . Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprized, that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable._ Manipulating short bits of film, including turn-of-the-twentieth-century documents, comedies, war films, home movies, and even bits _of Star Spangled to Death_ and _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_, Jacobs has made more than twenty performance pieces, some of them in multiple forms (as attested by Arthur’s reactions to two versions of nominally the same work just months apart). The conjuring of what Emerson calls “apparent, not substantial beings” became the primary exercise of Jacobs’s magic most of the years he was earning his living as a professor. In another register, the same Emersonian aesthetic prevails in the flat, projected films he made after _Tom, Tom_, especially in _The Georgetown Loop_ and _Disorient Express_ (both 1996). In the former, Jacobs juxtaposes two archival shots from 1903 of a moving train, mirror images in opposite directions, printed on a single 35-mm filmstrip, while the latter uses a 1906 source for a more elaborate manipulation of four moving images (including one projected upside down) of the same train at once. The temptation to return to projected film reflects Jacobs’s frustration with the ephemeral nature of the Nervous System performances. Klahr is undoubtedly correct in claiming that this body of work allowed the artist to move beyond the cinematic summa of _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_ and to sustain his aesthetic vision. In putting himself at the center of each of his performances, Jacobs also found a way around his phobia for completion, as his enthusiasm for invention and spontaneous discovery became the very stuff of his art. Yet at the same time, he was subverting his pressing need to make lasting works. In a sense, he had built a dimension of “failure” into his repeated successes with these performances. However, he has recently found a way to preserve the gist of his Nervous System works on DVD. Although the improvisational frisson and some of the most spectacular illusions are lost, the DVDs go a long way toward reproducing the original experiences. Much of _Optic Antics_ could not have been written without them. In fact, the book’s title derives from the 1997 performance _Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy_, in which Jacobs reworked a scene from the comedy duo’s 1929 film _Berth Marks_, extending the wordplay of that title into a fusion of birth trauma and erotic confusion as Laurel repeatedly falls out of the upper bunk on a train. The erotic potential of the Nervous System had been manifested as early as 1980, when Jacobs first performed a ninety-minute elaboration of an antique piece of French pornography _à trois_ as _XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX_. (For an account of the institutional and audience reaction to Jacobs’s first performance of this piece, see MacDonald’s essay cited above.) The exuberant reanimation of the presumably dead fornicators lends a necrophilic aura to the lighthearted protraction of their exhibitionistic al fresco ecstasy. In the Nervous System, as in _Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son_, the filmmaker repeatedly demonstrates that he is an archaeologist of the affections, not just discovering signs of vitality among the dead but insistently prolonging the electricity of life _because_ they are dead. This antinomy became all the more poignant to the viewer watching a Nervous System performance (rather than a DVD), insofar as one realized that all would be lost, or turned to memory, the minute the performance ended.  **Ken Jacobs, _Nissan Ariana Window_, 1968,** still from a color film in 16 mm, 14 minutes. The elegiac current of the Nervous System is most emphatic in _Two Wrenching Departures_, of 1989. The deaths of Smith and Fleischner within a week of each other prompted Jacobs to create a two-hour-long, three-dimensional envoi out of filmstrips of the two former friends shot in the 1950s and early ’60s. According to Tony Pipolo (in “Ken Jacobs’ _Two Wrenching Departures_”), who has seen more of the Nervous System performances than I, it is Jacobs’s “most affecting work in this form [and] a spectacularly theatrical experience.” Pipolo even pays supreme tribute to the filmmaker in an exquisite play on words when he writes: “Jacobs gives Smith the role of his life.” That, of course, is literally what Smith performs in _Two Wrenching Departures_: his life. Discussing the sound element of the performance as fixed on DVD, Pipolo observes that Jacobs’s use of large swaths of the dialogue from _The Barbarian_, a 1933 film with Ramon Novarro and Myrna Loy, is symptomatic of the filmmaker’s being simultaneously “drawn to and appalled by the aesthetics and transparent ideology of old Hollywood fare.” In one of the more far-reaching essays of _Optic Antics_, “Busby Berkeley, Ken Jacobs: A Precarious, Extravagant, Populist, and Constructivist Cinema,” Adrian Martin situates Jacobs’s work in a broad history of interactions between avant-garde and popular culture, arguing that “perhaps no filmmaker in all cinema brings together the _maudit_ and the flamboyant as systematically, radically, and energetically as Ken Jacobs.” Yet the broadest theoretical contextualization is that of Michele Pierson, one of the book’s three editors, who invokes Henri Bergson and, more persuasively, William James (in her essay “Jacobs’ Bergsonism”) as “parallels . . . [to] Jacobs’ own art and aesthetic philosophy” while acknowledging the irony of the filmmaker’s claim: “ ‘I want to work with experience all the time. I don’t even understand most conceptual work, I don’t get it.’ ” Her essay tacitly understands “experience” to be a conceptual category. Indeed, I would add that it is a central category for James, one that he elaborates from Emerson, his major precursor. Supported by Bergson, Pierson distinguishes between Jacobs’s use of “everyday experience” and that of John Cage or Allan Kaprow by pointing to Jacobs’s insistence on a fundamental difference between aesthetic representation and ordinary perception. Yet when she turns to James, that distinction dissolves. She astutely cites the chapter titled “Attention” in James’s _The Principles of Psychology_ (1890) as an analogue to the spirit of the Nervous System, and implicitly to Jacobs’s oeuvre in general: “The whole feeling of reality . . . depends on our sense that in it things are _really being decided_ from one moment to another.” She is scrupulous to add that “James isn’t talking about art here.” Although the American visionary tradition of which Jacobs is both a prime exemplar and in most respects a fierce advocate confounds the distinction between aesthetic and religious experience, his intense antipathy to religion in any form holds him apart. As what his friend Hollis Frampton would have called a heresiarch, Jacobs would rail against such a formulation of the tradition in which he plays so vital a part. _This month, Anthology Film Archives in New York presents a retrospective of Ken Jacobs’s 3-D films and videos (May 13–19), as well as a series of Nervous Magic Lantern performances, in conjunction with the publication of_ Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs _(Oxford University Press)._ _P. Adams Sitney, the author of_ Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson _(Oxford University Press, 2008), is currently the Anna-Maria Kellen fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, where he is writing a book on cinema and poetry. He teaches at The Lewis Center For the Arts, Princeton University._ More: - [Features May 2011](https://www.artforum.com/t/features-may-2011/) ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@sitney_ultimate_2011]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```