Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (review)

Ken Jacobs has been a key figure of the American avant-garde cinema for over half a century, but his films, videos, and performances have never been more relevant. As 3-D makes its return to suburban multiplexes everywhere, raising questions of the precise nature of cinematic illusionism and the allure of its spectacular attraction, Jacobs's extensive work with stereoscopy and visual astonishment provides a more thorough investigation into these matters than can be found in any critical literature to date. When the obsolescence of photochemical film poses serious questions for avant-garde cinema, a sphere of practice long invested in the specific qualities of that medium, Jacobs's unequivocal transition to digital video offers a rich case study in what changes and what remains the same after celluloid.

Scores of young filmmakers and video makers are ransacking the audiovisual archive in the production of found-footage work, but Jacobs was there first. And as standard theatrical exhibition is no longer the default situation in which moving images are consumed, the need to think through an existing history of paracinematic forms—such as Jacobs's Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances— becomes imperative. In short, despite belonging to the foundational generation of the American avant-garde, there is a sense that Jacobs's moment is now. All of these phenomena suggest that the appearance of Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs is rather timely, but as the first book dedicated solely to the filmmaker, its arrival is terribly belated.

Following in the wake of single-filmmaker anthologies such as To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (1992) and Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (2005), both edited by David E. James, Optic Antics assembles a diverse group of contributors, each bringing a distinct method and style to the project. In a prospectus written for Oxford University Press, the late Paul Arthur wrote that this anthology would not function "as a resolution or systematic untangling of the many contrasting, sometimes dissonant, chords in Jacobs's work" but instead would be "conceived as a discursive analogue to its underlying spirit of raucous contention" (19). These essays very much fulfill Arthur's hope, combining personal tribute, artists' projects, scholarly analysis, and historical narrative to produce a compelling and multifaceted account of Jacobs's practice. An Art Spiegelman cartoon detailing how a screening in Jacobs's class spawned the idea for Maus: A Survivor's Tale (1986) sits easily next to David E. James's parsing of the literary-historical background of The Sky Socialist (1964-68); Amy Taubin's fascinating interview with Flo Jacobs, "Flo Talks!," leads into Nicole Brenez's highly theoretical account of the figural economy of the various projects Jacobs derived from Billy Bitzer's 1905 film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son. However, despite the clear investment Optic Antics demonstrates in combining a multiplicity of sometimes contradictory approaches to Jacobs's life and work, across the book's twenty-three contributions, key concerns—and key omissions—emerge.

Central to the book is an effort to understand Jacobs's use of found footage from the preclassical cinema as something other than a materialist inquiry into the nature of the film medium. The notion that Jacobs might be engaged in a variety of ontological investigations proper to structural film has been perhaps the dominant way of thinking about the filmmaker's work since the publication of P. Adams Sitney's seminal Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde. While this dimension of Jacobs's filmmaking garnered a positive evaluation from Sitney, as the intellectual and artistic climates shifted in the 1980s, others would brandish the label of formalist as an epithet. The fascinating time capsule of experimental film culture offered in Scott MacDonald's "Ken Jacobs and the Robert Flaherty Seminar" describes the uproar that resulted when Jacobs showed XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (1980)—a Nervous System performance using a short pornographic film from the early 1920s—at the 1992 seminar. Audience members accused Jacobs...