I had the good fortune of coming across a gem on Netflix last night. If you’ve any experience with experimental cinema you know Ken Jacobs. He’s the guy who, with Jack Smith, made “Blonde Cobra”, a film somewhere between Robert Frank’s beatnik “Pull My Daisy” and the formalism of the later 60’s avant garde. Michael Snow’s Wavelength comes to mind.

Ken Jacobs is also known for his masterpiece of deconstruction “Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son”. I saw this at the Image Forum Festival in Shibuya, Tokyo. I was one of two or three people who sat through the entire 2 hour film which takes apart, bit by bit, a 5 minute film from 1905 by the same name. This remains one of my most favorite experiences with cinema. I think experience is the right word – it’s not something you simply watch. If you’re not sensorily and intellectually absorbed you really should just go to lunch and come back for the next feature. I also met Mr. Jacobs very briefly at a screening of Blonde Cobra at the same festival. He requested that I give up my seat for his wife. He was very apologetic about it. I used the opportunity to tell him that I was a fan and sat on the floor.

Netflix has neither Blonde Cobra nor Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son. It was a “Nervous Magic Lantern” performance called “Celestial Subway Lines” that I found on the “Watch Instantly” feature. John Zorn and Ikue Mori collaborated on the music, which is fantabulous. Whereas Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son goes back to the early days of cinema, the magic lantern is pre-cinematic – a means of projecting images and creating the appearance of movement. The Nervous Magic Lantern that Jacobs has devised creates a pulsing image, a flickering so pronounced that the screening is prefaced with a warning to epileptics. I found it physically challenging at times to view and had to squint or turn away. It is also a major mind bender. I found myself again and again grasping for a coherent picture of something. Shapes became a face, an arm, a forest, a pit of hot ashes and on and on, each vision replaced by another as the image pulsed and the depth of focus changed and it moved. Or perhaps didn’t move, that may have been just an illusion of the other manipulations taking place. It’s hard to say. There were long stretches when I was anticipating a certain change in perspective, a rotation, a fading. I learned that the course of metamorphosis from one image to the next did not follow a predictable arc. That alone is an accomplishment on the part of the artist. If we just follow our inclinations, our ingrained notions, the result is usually trite. So in places where the impulse would be to cross-dissolve, or fade to the next sequence you get instead something mysterious and inexplicable. I really can’t say what I saw or think of any means to approximate it. Obviously, I’m finding it difficult to describe it.

So, let me break it down to a different level. There is light and there is shadow – that is the image. There is softness and there is hardness – that is a photographic illusion of depth. And there is the change from light to shadow and from soft to hard – that is the movement. That’s it. Everything else takes place in your mind. Of course, it’s the everything else part that is really interesting. Ken Jacobs has devised a technology, an art, that seems to hit spots in the brain deep and essential. It reminds us of things we know about cognition – adaptive traits of pattern recognition and movement detection. How could that create such wonder? How could it be so frightening and so beautiful? But it does. And it is. Mr. Jacobs, I’m still your fan.