Between Film, Video, and the Digital by Kim Jihoon

Author:Kim, Jihoon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628922929
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Film frames’ infinite lives in the digital realm: Ken Jacobs’s recent digital videos

Jacobs became widely known as a key practitioner of “recycled cinema, a tradition of using earlier films as the raw material for new works of film art”86 after his landmark found footage film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969, hereafter abbreviated Tom, Tom), which reworks a 1905 silent comedy of the same name by G. W. “Billy” Bitzer (hereafter referred to as Bitzer’s Tom, Tom). Since 1999, Jacobs has produced more than twenty short and feature-length pieces grounded in the intermedial relation of digital video software and the avant-garde filmmaking method, resulting in the technical and aesthetic hybridities of their images. These two characteristics of Jacobs’s digital films are inseparable from the two idiosyncratic aspects of his prior cinematic practices in the history of found footage filmmaking. First, in his projection performances since the late 1960s, Jacobs uses two analytical 16-mm projectors to generate a wide variety of stereoscopic three-dimensional effects from various two-dimensional media images—a series of still pictures or a segment of 16-mm film reels. He also constantly associates film with Hans Hofmann’s tradition of Cubist and Abstract Impressionist painting, concerned with rendering movements and rhythms two-dimensionally. Jacobs’s films and performances accordingly have been influenced by Hofmann’s theory of “push and pull,” a technique that creates optical effects producing “tensions” between contrasting elements (color contrasts, lines, and geometrical shapes with different orientations, etc.) to render a sensation of motion and depth “without destroying other forces functioning two-dimensionally.”87

Some recent studies have examined the cross-disciplinary aspects of Jacobs’s cinema. Røssaak sees the co-presence of different arts and media in Tom, Tom as a “complex intermedia phenomenon where what is usually called a film or cinema renegotiates its relationship to other more or less closely-related systems of representation.”88 Additionally, in his research on the trajectory of Jacobs’s “Nervous System” performances with regard to the influences of shadow play and modernist painting, Jonathan Walley characterizes the practices as “paracinematic”—they seek the essence of cinema outside the standardized concept of the cinematic apparatus, in ways not relegated to the modernist notion of seeking film’s medium specificity in the materiality of celluloid, a dominant tenet of avant-garde film in the 1960s and 1970s.89 Jacobs’s embrace of digital video for reworking existing films (and sometimes still photographic images) relates considerably to his intermedial translation of one art to another—for instance, from painting to cinema, or from projection performance to single-channel moving image. This intermedial transition results in the hybrid aesthetic of the moving images in Jacobs’s digital pieces. I demonstrate in the following examples that the hybrid moving images in Jacobs’s works spring from the dialogue between his extension of the technical approaches to the digital editing that he developed for Tom, Tom and his Nervous System performances, and new aesthetic features afforded by digital video; and that this dialogue attests to the same dialectical-archival aspect of transitional found footage practices seen in Elder’s digital films.

In his feature-length revisits to Bitzer’s Tom, Tom,

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