Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs

ON TIC | TIC ON OPTIC ANTICS: THE CINEMA OF KEN JACOBS You've probably heard that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. In the case of Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, Oxford University Press, 20 1 1 ) feel free to do so. Donned by a portion of a wonderful 1967 photograph of Ken and Flo, taken by none other than Michael Snow, the front of this volume, edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and (posthumously) Paul Arthur, heralds intricate fascination, loudly! The image as it appears is nearly bisected by a post between a pair of windows. Ken, standing in front of them and on the right, with his head, shouldet, and chest in profile, holds out a mirror that stretches across to the other, better, half. Since that floating pane catches Flo's profil perdu (from her shoulder up), the left hand side belongs to her - doubly so, as a sliver of her arm anchors the bottom corner beside its reflection. Turn the book over, passing a spine of lintel and lace, and, thanks to designer Elsie Lyons' folding of Snow's original onto the back cover, find Flo's full visage alone, as if you stepped into Ken's mirror and circled round its feature. At Optic Antics' center (chapters 11 and 12 of 22) sits another Flo pair. In "Flo Talks! ", a 2008 interview conducted by Amy Taubin, "the producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema," as Taubin calls her, relates the struggles she had with her parents' attachment to the 'antiseptic'; the importance of Fred Astaire and Piet Mondrian to her life as person and painter; her experiences at RISD; meeting Ken in the summer of 1961; raising children and making art with him. This entry is preceded by "Some Jacobs Family Photos," a set often specimens curated and captioned by Flo. One of them is the Snow shot that in altered form (slightly cropped and majorly redistributed) adorns the book's exterior. This repetition and reiteration, this double movement from surface to deep middle, this churning of inside out, captures a major strategy of Jacobs' technique. The dissection in Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son (1969, revised 1971), the shuffling in The Doctor's Dream (1978), the vibrating 'eternalisms' of the digital videos (1999- ) and the flickering ones of the Nervous System (1975-2000) and Nervous Magic Lantern (1990- ) performances, and the further ephemerality of 'the Apparition Theater of New York (1967-1982), all testify to the game that Jacobs continuously initiates: "play is the confident abandonment and restoring of balance."1 Jacobs once referred to his stabilizer, the "triumvirate of persons that supports" him most crucially (mother Janice Rosenthal, who died at 27; painting teacher Hans Hofmann; "collaborator" Flo), as his "tripod."2 Indeed, he does seem to be a threelegged creature. Unique associations with Millennium Film Workshop, Binghamton University, and the Collective for Living Cinema, as well as a career that straddles film, digital and theater, exemplify two other significant trios. That our initial Snow spread over three surfaces (ventral, vertebral, dorsal) rhymes with these facts and introduces a new one: Optic Antics' three editors (with an especial tie to the one since lost). In the final note, number 90, of her thorough three-part "Introduction: Ken Jacobs - A HalfCentury of Cinema," Michele Pierson relates that Paul Arthur died six months after proposing this book to Oxford, and so follows the collection's only unaltered reprint: Arthur's 1997 Film Comment article "Creating Spectacle From Dross: The Chimeric Cinema of Ken Jacobs." In addition to invoking Jacobs' fancifulness by alluding to his connections to a "secret history of cinema," Arthur's overview of both the artist's aesthetic and its implementation in film and performance causes him to conclude that Jacobs' cinema, like the mythological beast, is 'mutant'. As a last look at the cover attests, Snow pictured a chimera too, triply dividing Ken's head on three grounds: hair on window; lips and chin on mirror; brow, nose, and philtrum on framing wood. …