ask Ken!
For the duration of the online show of Ken Jacobs, tank.tv offers a unique opportunity for discussion with the artist himself in an extended Q+A session.
Q: Why are you so fascinated with the Tom Tom the Pipers Son footage from 1905? Since making your Tom Tom in 1971, there have been Nervous System performances, A Tom Tom Chaser, Return to the Scene of Crime, which all use that same material, and now you’re working on a 3D video piece …
A: Tom Tom the Pipers Son fascinates me the way someone might be taken with untying a knot, the screen is so busy and direction of the viewer so lax. It seems a perfect way to keep someone amused without ever becoming enough. Fact is, I’m awed by it and adore the (slowly sorted-out) performers. It “springs to life” every time, lending itself to all my wacky permutations and ready after each for the next, a marker of development across the years.
Q: Is nepotism unavoidable in independent / underground cinema, just as it seems to be in mainstream Hollywood?
A: NEPOTISM IN THE ARTS
How prevent kids from picking up on what's happening around them? The family business happens despite what they also see of the frustrations. I liked working with the background sounds of home and they saw and heard a lot of spirited film-talk, met up with many vivid personalities. There were always movies, of course, all sorts of movies, some featuring themselves. It took some years before they knew to insist on stories, on actors, on talking, and until then Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage could be The Movies. Nisi was probably the only 4 year old who could do respectable Jack Smith and Jerry Sims imitations. She played in the lecture room as I taught (before I began commuting upstate), watched the films and had her questions, and very early on had a basic grasp of the technology: camera, film, projector, screen. (As a tot she yelled, "Turn it off! Turn it off!", meaning the projector when The Three Stooges gave her a scare.) Exposure, though, was wide and eventually ZAZIE DANS LE METRO and CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING would be favorites. Today she's a maker of abstract-videos and a wonder, though her kid-brother (his favorite was 5000 FINGERS OF DOCTOR T and both loved - my illegal print of - HELLZAPOPPIN') is getting the sort of wide attention that can only come - once in a blue moon - to narrative film-makers.
When Azazel was 11 we stepped out of a theater after seeing ALIEN and without prompting or self-consciousness he embarked on an analysis of the film's symbolism. Freaked me out. He already knew cultural work was open to interpretation, that things could stand in for other things, usually the unspeakable. Both kids made 8mm films in their teens and Nisi got into Cooper Union with film as part of her portfolio. Aza actually wanted to study with Dad but - despite "the best application film ever submitted" (Prof. Larry Gottheim) - he was rejected by some accursed office drone because of low high-school grades (he had inherited my dyslexia). He went instead to SUNY Purchase where he was happy ever after studying with the likes of Tom Gunning and Mimi Arsham.
Fact is, not that "normalcy" is easy but for all its flavors the artist's life can be unnerving for kids. Flo and I as parents saw that newborns have inner traits and dispositions and are not infinitely malleable as the Catholic Church says. Children grow up in another time from their parents, in different circumstances. Human children do not replicate their parents and yet are compared to them, very unfair. As models Flo and I were a mix of winners/losers, nice enough yet rigid as hell in our own way. Kids, who start out so clearly individual taking on the world, soon become the worst conformists and then it's all about measuring up; even their push to exceed is almost always along given paths. Compared with the other parents they met, who seemed less intense, wealthier, their own seemed off the charts. Aza says he only wanted a home with a rug instead of old floorboards. Nisi was not allowed Barbies. It seems a joke but what the child senses from the different is danger, being steered off-course. Different is out-of-it, flaky, and that's not good. They wanted to root for the home-team, for USA, while we were telling them the official history was a lie and a scam. Nisi and Aza did come around to embrace similar values, but new personalities are no simple extrusion process.
Sure, our kids were helped - somewhat - by growing up knowing people in the field, but not near as much as might be thought. A major advantage was knowing Big Names as people, great artists up close with their skin problems. But finally it's still the work they produce that matters. A critic who'd known Aza all his life had terrible problems with his earlier shorts and features and said so (and was really surprised to then be taken with MOMMA'S MAN). Don't think there's a readiness to be nice, sweetly forgiving, when people devote their lives to cinema. The static of personal connection often means more hesitation to approve.
One does not inherit sustained recognition and falling short of a parent's rep can be a misery. Not so easy, this following -in-the-footsteps thing. We of course are in the no-business of cinema. I know nothing of what happens in studio -production but figure, even with the studio as a birthday gift, the kid has to deliver.
Q: Could you name five books, five films (outside your oeuvre), five musical recordings you would choose for pleasure if shipwrecked on a desert isle?
A:I'm sticking to widely available writers and artists (no painters requested, hmmm) and avoiding picking out contemporaries.
First five books (novels) that come to mind out of the thousands that I love: MOBY DICK by Herman Melville, INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, SATAN IN GORAY by Isaac Bashevis Singer, MISS LONELYHEARTS / THE DAY OF THE LOCUST (two novellas) by Nathaniel West, GEEK LOVE by Katherine Dunn, THE COUNTERLIFE by Philip Roth: Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, END PRODUCT by Dan Sabbath and Mandel Hall, if you can find it. There, that's five.
Another five: PLAYTIME, GREED, APPLAUSE, THE LAST FLIGHT, MILLION DOLLAR LEGS (with Jack Oakie, W.C. Fields, Lyda Roberti…), THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, early BETTY BOOP, Altman's POPEYE. Ken Russell's THE BOYFRIEND. Now the shame and guilt will hit, I should never have begun this one.
Five composers (can't select pieces, that's too much): Charles Ives (Second and Fourth Symphonies dammit), Fats Waller, DebussyRavelSatieMessiaen, Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Schnittke, Janacek's GLAGOLITIC MASS … This selecting favorites (of the moment) is a terrible error! Now there's no chance I'll ever get to heaven.
Q: Besides image quality, do you see major differences between the internet and other media? And will you make works specifically for the internet?
A: With Erik Nelson's help at the computer, we've got some short pieces ready for the internet. Just screened two at Anthology, they looked good on the big screen and the audience dug them. Yes; size, volume counts, with music and with images. However, they also look good on Erik's iPod (I don't have one). My vague thought is to make them available for downloading at best resolution with a request that people send a dollar into a PayPal account for each one and not charge admission to others to see them. Something like that. If the downloader is short on money, forget it, that's okay, enjoy the work. I've been told there's writing on the web regarding The Gift Economy. I'm already sold! but it could be because we're no longer in want. Want. I remember it well.
Q: You started making Star Spangled to Death in 1957 and completed it in 2004. What is it about that work that makes it still relevant? Has nothing changed since then?
A: Star Spangled to Death was put aside after I failed, in the early Sixties, to get money to cover final lab costs. It wasn’t worked at for decades, when sections would sometimes have a “concert” screening. Completed as affordable video in 2001-04 it of course reflected much that had happened since 1960, and was happening, not that things were all that different in USA from the 1950s/60s Rule Of Venal Stupidity. Originally a work in the present tense it remains mindful of a later Bush-Cheney present. Now I can look back on it (!) impressed at how well it calls the shots. For instance: “Forget right-wing ideologues; they’re crooks!”
Q: Some of your work, namely using the nervous magic lantern system, is happening for the first time as it is made, as light projected on a screen, something which is inherently difficult to capture and document. Nevertheless it's very important that this work is documented and available in the future: how do you resolve this dilemma ?
A: Thank you for caring about the performance pieces surviving into posterity. Some years ago a fellow videotaped one of my performances and showed the tape to me afterwards. I'd been indifferent to the possibility of preserving performance this way, not having caught up with digital recording. There were things on analogue I liked, particularly by my friend Ralph Hocking who emphasized "low-res"(olution) in his work, but it was obvious analogue couldn't do justice to the live projections and it seemed to decay overnight. The digital recording astonished me, the effects were there, the depth-illusions were there. Flo and I had tried capturing to film and that hadn't worked and it had been a pain to see all these pieces come and go.
I began to record digitally but still wasn't satisfied, not with unedited recordings of pieces performed with a pair of stop-motion projectors (The Nervous System). There was something unavoidable I'd been putting up with in those performances, the time spent adjusting the two images on-screen as I went from one image-pair to the next. It wasn't enough to preserve the character of live performance, I longed to see working connection after connection without the static. And then the computer entered my thinking. And then I devised a method of creating my effects entirely on the computer (well, almost; see the Tzadik release NEW YORK GHETTO FISHMARKET 1903). So now there's been videos using both methods as well as recordings of Nervous Magic Lantern performance (no film; projection of painting-transparencies and of objects; again Tzadik, CELESTIAL SUBWAY LINES / SALVAGING NOISE). Like yourself I'm told that only film can actually preserve this work
but I don't believe it. Some way will be found to pass on memory reduced to off-on signals.
Q: How do you feel about the internet as a method of distribution or viewing your work?
A: I love the Internet and hope to eventually see all my work available on it in best resolution. Free to individuals or perhaps with a non-coercive request for small sums, but standard costs to institutions. Could be that those who wish to can put money in a fund reserved for paying my assistants, that would help. Flo and I enjoy a lower middle-class existence on my teaching-retirement money, perhaps to be wiped out by market machinations but we do not gamble and perhaps will be spared. We’d like to leave something helpful to daughter Nisi and son Azazel. My 78rpm record collection? Doubtful that it’s worth much. A lot of my films and videos of course and they may accrue value. Money does sometimes come to us – sometimes really needed – and we’re always happily surprised. So it’s nice if it happens but couldn’t be less a motive for continuing to make works.
Q: Many filmmakers are now having their work shown in an art gallery context rather than in the cinema. What do you think about this shift in context and is it suitable for your work?
A: Some works could work in galleries but, other than screen size, home-distribution is probably best. Wherever concentration is best is best (we don’t gather in theaters to read books together). No hi-fi beats a well-designed music hall but I like the isolation with the music, the communing alone with the composer or performer that ‘s possible at home. For true conviviality I suggest the sundown stroll, great for mating, that the whole town participates in as practiced in Sicily.
Q: On 29 November, you’re doing a Nervous Magic Lantern performance at the BFI IMAX in London. What is the Nervous Magic Lantern?
A: Abstraction can offer the opportunity to meet and grapple directly with risky situations, taking real chances instead of identifying with some actor-proxy on a movie-set. The viewer of Nervous Magic Lantern phenomena plunges, hovers, sinks and rises into illusionary deep space. The question of what we are looking at, tantalizingly suggestive as appearances might be, becomes of less urgency than from where in space we are viewing and where and of what consistency and shape and size is the mass confronting us at any one moment and when and how did it become what a moment ago it was not. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination. My self-constructed “lantern” utilizes neither film nor video.