Where Shadow Play Is Cinema: The Exhibition and Critical Reception of Ken Jacobs's Shadow Plays in the 1960s and 1970s

Ken Jacobs's first shadow play was made for the New Cinema Festival in 1965. For centuries, shadow plays have used light to back project moving shadows of puppets, objects, and/or actors onto a screen. In his reviews of expanded cinema performances at the festival, Jonas Mekas grappled with the question of what makes a moving image cinema. The exhibition spaces in which Jacobs's 2-D and 3-D shadow plays were presented very much determined how critics wrote about them. This essay puts the archaeological gesture of Jacobs's shadow play and two-projector film performances that he called the Nervous System in the context of work by other artists, journalists, historians, and curators similarly engaged in expanding our senses of what cinema is or might be.