"3D is rather a slighting way to speak of deep space. I enjoyed AVATAR and HUGO, though not much else among the movies I’ve seen in illusionary depth. They place things in depth but don’t go at depth as a realm to be investigated, toyed with; no mindbenders other than story. Cezanne, Cubism,...
Jacobs documents a New York street vendor, taking a short interaction between the vendor and a customer and protracting it into a strobing, throbbing, pulsing meditation on movement and light.
1906 - Original cinematographer unknown. 1996 - New arrangement by Ken Jacobs. Shots shown as found in "A Trip Down Mount Tamalpais", the Paper Print Collection, Library of Congress. Optically copied by Sam Bush, Western Cine Lab., Denver, from l6mm to 35mm letterbox format to allow double-image...
Jacobs’s hypnotic “3-D” adaptation of New York 1911, a long-forgotten Swedish documentary restored by MoMA in 2017, is representative of his current work.
“All hallucinations of Paradise Lost come from the longing to levitate. Vision is lightship and shipwreck - Herbert Postl from Ideal Forms of Vanishing
Fall into winter 1964, Urban Renewal forced us to move a few blocks to West of Broadway. Our Sky Socialist ‘set’ is still standing and I’m drawn back to document more. It’s old New York, a lot of history. And then it no longer stands, no more than my first home in the slums of Williamsburg...
Ken and Flo Jacobs walk from an MTA bus to their apartment in the icy rain. This is transformed by a 360° camera and digital effects into an unforgettable trek on the actual planet.
Berlin documented by the US after WW2, recorded again in 1986 by Flo and Ken feigning innocence when passing by elevated train between Capitalist showroom and Communist austerity. One roll of film is blank, evidence of East Berlin guards commanding the film be unloaded onto the station platform. KJ...
"Waiting, waiting, for a bus to carry us a mile downtown. We often give up and walk. When we commit ourselves to waiting the bus usually appears with a second bus, empty, trailing by a block. We assume the drivers feel free to stop and gab between rounds; not nice, but then the job is impossible...
Avant-garde master Ken Jacobs' dizzying digital reinvention of a 1903 Edison "actuality" stretches and bends the one-minute film to an incredible, almost hallucinogenic ninety-three, combining period stereoscopic slides to create a fascinating play of depth and 2- and 3-dimensionality, narrative...
Studying painting with Hans Hofmann had sensitized me to depth phenomena, to strange readings of depth including the most unnatural: flat. In 1964, I learned of the Pulfrich Effect and gained access to wholly illusionistic depth way beyond indication. This led in 1975 to my partner Flo and I...
"2013. USA. Directed by Ken Jacobs. With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs. Part two of four. “Joys…began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather...
