"Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)"

By David Hudson on 05/14/2009

[Updated through 5/15]

"A mad professor of visual perception, Ken Jacobs has produced decades of work investigating the underpinnings of optical experience," writes Ed Halter for Artforum. "After shooting madcap romps with the likes of Jack Smith, Jacobs embarked on his analytic projects with 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son' (1969-71), created in the thick of the structural turn in North American avant-garde filmmaking, when artists like Michael Snow, Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton discarded visual poetics in favor of a more rigorous investigation and reconstruction of film form."

Jacobs "plays and manipulates the 1905 short 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son' with the gleeful aplomb of a man who hadn't dedicated nearly two hours to the short in 1969 and then another two hours last year in homage to and in fascination with the cinema," writes Daniel Kasman in The Auteurs' Notebook. "'Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)' is in 3D, a whole new reason to burrow deep into the short, I guess - freezing, slowing down, overlapping, laying moving areas of the frame over frozen sections, all with a wonderfully unexpected soundtrack - except, at least on video, the effect doesn't work so well."

"The effects, while admittedly more Video Toaster than Pixar, reinvent the visual space with a restless vigor, and Jacobs takes palpable delight in having another plane upon which to project his magic lantern," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice.

"Although Jacobs has written that the 'real subject' of 'Anaglyph Tom' is 'depth-perception itself,' it's clear that the filmmaker has a few other things on his mind as well," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "If the implicit political context of Jacobs's 2007 feature 'Razzle Dazzle' - like the present film, a digital deconstruction of an early-20th-century short - was the occupation of Iraq, then the explicit context of 'Anaglyph Tom' is the current economic crisis and the years of unregulated free-market activity that made it possible. But the film's political concerns are less well integrated into the project than in the earlier work and we're left to conjecture as to just how the film's three instances of topical allusion - a shot of a newspaper headline, footage of Alan Greenspan testifying before the Senate oversight committee, and barely audible sound bites playing over the final abstract imagery - fit in with the film's more central concerns."

"Jacobs's mastery of 3D is intermittent, but when it works, the new textures bestowed upon Edison's long-dead cast are moving," writes Kevin B Lee in Time Out New York. "The more aesthetically abrasive segments aren't for everyone (especially those with epilepsy), but if Anthology lets you take the required 3D specs home, wear them while googling 'anaglyph' and you'll get another couple hours of eye-popping fun."

At Anthology Film Archives from tomorrow (Friday) through Thursday, May 21.

Updates, 5/15: Online listening tip. Aaron Hillis at GreenCine Daily: "On a perfect spring day in New York, I met Jacobs at the door of his Tribeca home (otherwise known as the set of son [Azazel Jacobs's] most recent feature 'Momma's Man'), then strolled to a nearby park to shoot the breeze about the space between 2D and 3D, why he and his wife only watch TV on an 11" Amiga monitor, his thoughts on seeing 'Moonstruck' for the first time, and how he plans to get back at his son for putting his parents in a movie."

"'Anaglyph Tom' fails to enmesh its formal and political concerns as neatly or powerfully as 'Razzle Dazzle,'" writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times, "and it doesn't come close to rivaling the groundbreaking vision of 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son.' But even the least of Mr Jacobs's efforts illuminate a rare imagination - or what Mr Greenspan calls an ideology: 'a conceptual framework with the way people deal with reality.'"

Online viewing tip. At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri presents Jacobs's 2007 short 'Capitalism: Slavery,' "in which the director takes a Victorian stereograph of cotton pickers and, essentially, animates it into cinema. Technically speaking, it's of a piece with Jacobs's recent projects of taking images from the past and finding new ways of entering their frames. But there's something particularly chilling about 'Capitalism: Slavery' - by giving it movement and depth, Jacobs gives us the uncomfortable feeling that the past is never really that far away."

Michael Joshua Rowin talks with Jacobs for the L Magazine and finds him "not so amused... when, in bringing up 'Anaglyph Tom (Tom With Puffy Cheeks),' I call the 3D process it employs a novelty. '2D's the novelty,' he corrects. 'The world falling flat onto one non-dimensional plane? That's crazy. 3D is the world we live in.'"

[Photo: "Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)," Ken Jacobs, 2008]

Tags: Avant-Garde, Ken Jacobs