Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist*

MALCOLM TURVEY
OCTOBER 137, Summer 2011, pp. 107124. 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The work of Ken Jacobs, writes Tom Gunning in his seminal essay about the
filmmaker, teaches us to watch movies with a vision akin to both X-ray and micro-
scope, uncovering what is concealed and paying attention to what is generally
ignored.
1
Jacobss Perfect Film (1985)a compilation of discarded outtakes from
television news footage shot in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm Xs assassina-
tionreveals things that the people on camera never intended to reveal,
2
and in
general, as Gunning put it to Jacobs in a 1989 interview, his works reveal, unmask.
(To which Jacobs responded with a pun: Reveal masks. Well, I agree with you.)
3
Gunning turns to Walter Benjamins notion of the optical unconsciousfirst
advanced, according to Rosalind Krauss, in Benjamins 1931 essay Small History of
Photography
4
to understand Jacobss revelatory project: Walter Benjamin
declared that cinema shared with psychoanalysis an ability to probe into realms of
reality of which we were not previously conscious, Gunning remarks.
5
Jacobs uses
the basic tools of his filmmaking to fracture the overwhelming familiarity of the
moving image, blocking our most ingrained visual habits so that something else
could take place.
6
In fact, as Gunning acknowledges, long before Benjamin, film
theorists and filmmakers had argued that the cinemas most important property is
its capacity to make visible truths about reality partially or wholly invisible to human
sight, and they frequently compared the cinema to revelatory visual technologies
* Thanks to Federico Windhausen, who knows much more about the work of Ken Jacobs than I,
for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay and his help in selecting and preparing material for
this issue. Thanks, as well, to Annette Michelson for her editorial advice, and to Adam Lehner for his
(seemingly infinite) patience.
1. Tom Gunning, Films That Tell Time: The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken Jacobs, in Films
That Tell Time: A Ken Jacobs Retrospective, exh. cat., ed. David Schwartz (New York: American Museum of
the Moving Image, 1989), p. 6.
2. Ibid.
3. Tom Gunning and David Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, in Films That Tell Time, p. 38.
4. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 178.
5. Gunning, Films That Tell Time, p. 7.
6. Ibid.
108 OCTOBER
Kino-eye is understood as that which the eye doesnt see, as the microscope and
telescope of time, Dziga Vertov famously wrote in 1924.
7
Their work, I have argued
elsewhere, constitutes a distinct tradition in film historyrevelationismand
Jacobs is one of this traditions most important and brilliant contemporary practi-
tioners, extending it into the digital era.
8
What distinguishes revelationism is its embrace of both the cinemas capacity
to reproduce reality, as beloved by realists such as Andr Bazin, and its ability to
transform reality, as celebrated by modernists like Rudolf Arnheim. Jacobs often
echoes Bazins claim about the ontological realism of photography, its capacity to
force us to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced.
9
Because pho-
tographs have a causal relation to their subjects, writes Berys Gaut in explaining
ontological realism, it follows that the subject of the photograph existed at the
time the photograph was made: one cannot photograph something that does not
exist.
10
In discussing the found footage and photographs that he employs in his
films and performances, Jacobs has said, These arent mere images on a screen.
Life took place in front of a camera. There really was this Woodrow Wilson. They
really did shake hands.
11
Elsewhere, Jacobs has remarked that he uses found mater-
ial because it is imperative for him to touch the past. Im very aware that these
are not just shots; these are things, life, that happened in front of the camera. Im
very interested in getting to that moment.
12
Yet unlike realists, Jacobs does not hesi-
tate to overtly alter recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. Im
studying the evidence of fixed emulsion particles, he has declared, and I want my
tampering with the evidence to be evident.
13
Jacobs manipulates found films and
old photographs using a variety of techniques, including ones employed by his
revelationist forebears. When asked by David Schwartz about his use of slow
motion in his Nervous System performancesin which he slowly advances, frame-
by-frame, two prints of the same film on two projectorsJacobs objected: I tend
to think of it in a way that Dziga Vertov talks about it, as an expansion rather than
a slowing down, as a magnification of time. Nothing has been actually slowed
down, were just finding more time in that time.
14
Vertov often attributed his discovery of the revelatory power of cinema to see-
ing a short, slow-motion film of himself leaping off a building in 1918. Didnt
recognize my face on the screen, he remarked. My thoughts were revealed on my
7. Dziga Vertov, Birth of Kino-Eye, in Vertov, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette
Michelson, trans. Kevin OBrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 41.
8. On revelationism, see my Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2008).
9. Andr Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, in Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 13.
10. Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 67.
11. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 41.
12. Julie Hampton, An Interview with Ken Jacobs, Millennium Film Journal 32/33 (Fall 1998),
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ32%2C33/hampton.htm (accessed May 26, 2011).
13. Ken Jacobs, Addenda to Interview, in Films That Tell Time, p. 61.
14. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 33.
facehesitation, vacillation, firmness (a struggle with myself), and again, the joy of
victory. First thought of the kino-eye as a world perceived without a mask, as a
world of naked truth (truth cannot be hidden).
15
Other revelationists, particularly
Jean Epstein and Bla Balzs, have also singled out the cinemas ability to make
the inner man visible, as Balzs put it, and
Jacobs is no exception. In discussing the peo-
ple inter viewed about Malcolm Xs
assassination in the outtakes that make up
Perfect Film, Jacobs notes, So many things are
revealed, such as the way one acts in front
of a camera and what it means to be on
television, and he goes on to suggest that his
films have often been concerned with uncov-
ering the transition between face and
mask, the moment at which the person
backstage puts down their coffee cup and
steps onstage and into the role.
16
(Such a
moment, as P. Adams Sitney notes, occurs in
Blonde Cobra [195963], when Jack Smith,
during one of his improvised monologues
about a lonely little boy, suddenly switches
from third to first person to reveal the
trauma of his own loneliness as a child.
17
)
However, again like Vertov, Jacobss revelatory
impulse extends beyond uncovering truths
about the people and places preserved in
found footage to exposing the properties of
film itself, including the distinctive percep-
tual experiences it can create. In Man with a
Movie Camera (1929), to cite one of many well-
known examples, a close-up of Elizavet a
Svilova editing a strip of celluloid containing still frames of a boy laughing is fol-
lowed by a shot consisting of these frames, now animated, so that the boy moves as
he laughs. Cinemas impression of motion is thereby revealed to be an illusion cre-
ated out of still images. Jacobs also views illusion and its unmasking as enabling
other kinds of knowledge, not available before.
18
In Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son
(196971), in addition to slowing down, stopping, and reversing the projection of
the 1905 original, so that the illusion of movement repeatedly dissolves into a series
of still images, Jacobs at one point lets the entire print of the film run through the
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 109
15. Vertov, quoted in Kino-Eye, pp. 4041.
16. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, pp. 42, 43.
17. P. Adams Sitney, The Ultimate Ken Jacobs, Artforum (May 2011), p. 265.
18. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 33.
Dziga Vertov. Man with a
Movie Camera. 1929.
projector in reverse with the pull-down mecha-
nism disengaged. The result is a blur in which,
occasionally, one can discern an individual
frame or two when the print briefly slows.
Jacobs also sometimes films the screen on
which the original is projected from different
angles and distances, and he even removes the
screen to reveal the projector and its beam
behind it . These techniques, along with
numerous others, make visible the fact that we
are watching a recording of a reel of celluloid
consisting of still images being projected onto
a screen in a darkened space.
Another hallmark of revelationism is its skepticism about human vision.
Revelationists like Vertov altered recordings of reality in order to reveal truths
about the world that, they believed, sight is incapable of seeing because of its
limitations. Vertov argued that the human eye suffers from two fundamental
defects, both of which the cinema can overcometemporal and spatial immo-
bility, and disorganization. Jacobs also frequently remarks on the eyes capacity
to be deceived: The serious avant-garde is less concerned with subject matter
than with existential processes: what is it to know the world via our senses and
the tools we use to feed those senses? We fool ourselves consciously, to ward off
being duped by the particular mechanisms nature has provided humans.
19
And
like Vertov, he views our capacity to be fooled by visual illusions as playing a cen-
tral role in political enslavement, which is why filmmakers must entertainingly
expose the fraud: The recognized illusion is the death of the social delusion
that keeps a populace infantilized, either by religion or the technology of
images that leaders now employ to keep their flocks in line.
20
However, his the-
ory of the shortcomings of human vision owes little to Vertovs and is much
more akin to Stan Brakhages formulation. Brakhage famously blamed language
for our tendency to classify sights, to reduce the richness, wonder, and strange-
ness of visual experience to familiar, preexisting concepts and symbols. He
therefore advocated a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded
upon visual communication [that is] dependent on perception in the original
and deepest sense of the word.
21
Jacobs also frequently derides our tendency to
ascribe to [sensory experience] a snug system of meanings, to channel things
into language.
22
OCTOBER 110
19. Ken Jacobs, Three Letters on Czanne, in Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs, ed. Michele
Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 168.
20. Ibid., p. 169.
21. Stan Brakhage, From Metaphors on Vision, in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and
Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1987), p. 120.
22. Ken Jacobs, Beating My Tom Tom, Exploding special issue on Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son (October
2000), p. 6.
Ken Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The
Pipers Son. 196971.
Reading a film for meanings is a sorry substitute for sensory experi-
ence. But t hings get out of hand, direct exper ience is LSD
intractable and not everyone can lend themselves to the swim of
things. The actuality of art just as of life can then become host to
signs. For some of us such signs become the exclusive currency of
thought. Symbolic parallel structures arise, often with a compelling
beauty of their own (forget the art, forget the world). Passed on and
elaborated, such structures can take on vivid local color even as they
conform to the language-forming disposition of the human mind
everywhere; behind the local color the mythic banalities, which,
mind-made, feel so right to the mind. To doubt must be madness, and
our tragedy is that so many will defendif not imposethe right-
ness of their big idea to the death, preferably of others. Ultimately
each cultures passed-on idea of anything, i.e., its idea of what a dog
is, becomes a tightly held religious concept. Non-literary sensory
apprehension is left to modernist apostates. Get lost, I tell my stu-
dents, And get lost again.
23
Its not anti-intellectual to not wish to limit the intellect to words, alphabetic or
ideographic, Jacobs continues, and, like Brakhage, he strives in many of his films
and other works to create an adventure of perception for his viewers (One tries
to offer people actual adventure, he has stated), to lead them to make visual dis-
coveries in and through the moving image, which is more dramatic than any
meaning.
24
Unlike Brakhage, however, Jacobs typically does this by uncovering and
exploring the neglected richness of found footage and photographs, which
brings us to the second perceptual limitation he frequently points to in explain-
ing his work. When watching a film, he says, you cant see it all. Youre usually
looking from place to place. That means there are an infinite number of routes
through the film that can actually be worked out when youre not looking at
Ingrid Bergmans eyes.
25
In addition, filmmakers, especially those who make
precision entertainments, know exactly where the audience is looking on the
screen, and theyre conducted on this path.
26
Furthermore, narrative, and the
anxious suspense it creates, tends to focus the viewers attention on what is going
to happen next rather than what is occurring now.
27
For all these reasons, viewers
miss a great deal when watching a moving image, and it is this overlooked but
boundless visual manifoldness that Jacobs seeks to recover in many of his
films and performances by revealing the fascinating details and perceptual
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 111
23. Ibid., p. 5.
24. Ibid., pp. 8, 15.
25. Gunning and Schwartz, Interview with Ken Jacobs, p. 35.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., p. 36.
effects of discarded imagery that probably went unnoticed when they were first
exhibited.
28
In this way, Jacobss desire to create a non-literary visual adventure for
his viewers dovetails with his wish to touch the past. For example, by magnifying
the face of a barely visible factory worker looking at the camera from behind rows
of textile machines in a nineteenth-century stereograph in Capitalism: Child Labor
(2006), Jacobs both uncovers a detail of the original stereograph that is easy to
miss and encourages the viewer to contemplate a real person, to wonder who he
was, what he was thinking about and doing at the precise moment the pho-
tographs were taken, and what subsequently happened to him. The same is true of
Jacobss use of eternalism (discussed later) and other processes for enhancing
the illusion of depth in his films and performances, which both dynamize the
image, rendering it more visually fascinating through the creation of often other-
worldly, ambiguous depth impressions, and make the figures captured in the
image appear more life-like and therefore present. For Jacobs, illusion is a means
to other kinds of knowledge, including an awareness of an easily forgotten past
that, through its illusory fullness and presence in the image, can be acknowl-
edged. The best thing you can do in this arrangement of the present, Jacobs
has said, is honor the once all-in-color reality of that one, that it was the present
the way this is the present. Another sunny day, with terrible things happening.
29
As Federico Windhausen has astutely pointed out, this is how the formal and
the social meet for Jacobs: on the ground of a shared utopian belief in the possi-
bility of a much richer seeing and comprehension.
30
Jacobss revivification of
the visual possibilities of discarded imagery is at the same time an ethical, even
political, reanimation of the past and those Jacobs sees as its forgotten victims,
such as factory workers.
Or at least it was. For Capitalism: Child Labor, along with all of Jacobss films
since 1999, is a digital video, and according to many new-media theorists, it is pre-
cisely the connection with the past, and with reality in general, that digital video
forecloses because of its purported lack of indexicality. For the indexical image,
through its physical connection, touches the real, bears its impression, and hence
assures us that it is still there; while the digital image has the potential to abstract
and isolate itself, severing any connection with an autonomous reality, writes Mary
Ann Doane.
31
The index makes that claim by virtue of its privileging of contact, of
touch, of a physical connection. The digital can make no such claim and, in fact, is
defined as its negation.
32
Is Jacobs mistaken or confused in thinking that he can
continue to touch the past using digital video in place of celluloid film?
OCTOBER 112
28. Ibid., p. 40.
29. Ibid., p. 41.
30. Federico Windhausen, Theories of Moving Pictures: Ken Jacobs After Hans Hofmann, in Optic
Antics, p. 243.
31. Mary Ann Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, Differences 18, no. 1
(2007), pp. 14042.
32. Ibid., p. 142.
The index is, of course, a concept taken from the work of Charles Sanders
Peirce and first applied to film by Peter Wollen in the late 1960s in order to explain
the nature of cinematic signs.
33
Peirces writings are, in the words of Joel Snyder,
exceptionally complex, demanding, and often obscure, and his famous division of
signs into icons, indices, and symbols is just one of a number of typologies the
philosopher proposed and modified throughout his life.
34
(By his own count, Peirces
final typology contains sixty-six classes of signs, most of which are ignored by theo-
rists of film and photography.) According to Peirce scholar Albert Atkin, common to
Peirces many attempts to define the index is the claim that indices use some physi-
cal contiguity with their object to direct attention to that object.
35
The index,
wrote Peirce in 1885, like a pronoun demonstrative or relative, forces the attention
to the particular object intended without describing it,
36
and again in the early
1900s he asserted that anything which focuses the attention is an index.
37
Peirce
gave as examples signs that focus attention on objects because of a predictable causal
relationship between them, as when smoke is a sign of fire. It is because of the causal
relation between photographs and their objects that Peirce himself argued that pho-
tographs are indices. But his examples of indices also include signs such as the
polestar, which indicates the north, or a pointing finger that indicates the direction
to be followed, where there is no dyadic or causal relationship between an index
and its object.
38
Furthermore, according to Peirce, it would be difficult, if not
impossible, to instance an absolutely pure index, or to find any sign absolutely devoid
of the indexical quality.
39
Thus, contrary to what some have claimed, many digital
images, even computer-generated ones, qualify as indices in the Peircean sense if
only because no sign is absolutely devoid of the indexical quality.
40
A drawing,
painting, or computer-generated image of a finger outside a restaurant pointing
toward its entrance can be an index of the entrance, as can a digital photograph of a
finger pointing toward the entrance, or indeed a digital photograph of the restau-
rants owner pointing toward it. All three can focus the attention of passersby on
the restaurant entrance, and they can do so in part thanks to their physical contigu-
ity to it, even though none have a causal relationship to it.
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 113
33. Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969).
34. Joel Snyder, Pointless, in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007),
p. 378.
35. Albert Atkin, Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce
Society 41, no. 1 (Winter 2005), p. 163.
36. Charles Sanders Peirce, One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and Nature, in
The Writings of Charles S. Peirce, vol. 5 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 243.
37. Charles Sanders Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in Philosophical Writings of
Peirce, ed. and intro. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p. 108.
38. Atkin, Peirce on the Index and Indexical Reference, p. 167.
39. Peirce, Logic as Semiotic, p. 108.
40. On the fact that, for Peirce, all signs are in some respect indexical, see the excellent discussion
in Martin Lefebvre and Marc Furstenau, Digital Editing and Montage: The Vanishing Celluloid and
Beyond, Cinmas: Journal of Film Studies 13, nos. 12 (2002), p. 93.
Theorists such as Doane are aware of the breadth of Peirces definition of an
index, which is why she suggests that celluloid-based photographs are indexical in a
different, narrower sense. Echoing Bazins controversial claim that photography
enjoys a certain advantage in virtue of this transference of reality from the thing to
its reproduction, she argues that, like a stain, photographs are created by objects
physically touching and leaving behind a trace of themselves on a surface.
41
When
the index is exemplified by the footprint or the photograph, she writes, it is a sign
that can be described as a trace or imprint of its object. Something of the object
leaves a legible residue through the medium of touch. . . . Only [this] definition
the index as imprint or trace (preeminently the footprint)seems to correspond to
the cinematic image.
42
It is in the sense of contact, of touch that celluloid-based
photographs are indexical and digital ones arent, she believes. However, it is difficult
to see how a celluloid-based photograph is touched by its objects. Doane seems to
think that it is the light rays bouncing off the objects in front of a celluloid-based
camera and reacting with the photochemical surface inside the camera that enable
those objects to touch and thereby imprint or inscribe the resultant photograph.
Light, as the physical connection, affects the photochemical base in such a way that
it bears the imprint of the object, she writes.
43
But while we sometimes speak
metaphorically of being touched by objects that emit or reflect light (I want to be
one who is touched by the sun, sings Carly Simon), it is not literally the case that
those objects physically touch us via the light they reflect or emit. I am not physically
touched by President Obama just because the light rays bouncing off his body and
entering my eyes enable me to see him in the distance at a political rally, just as I am
not physically touched by a wall when I bounce a ball against the wall and the ball hits
my head. Meanwhile, if I use a magnifying glass to focus light rays on my arm and
burn my skin, it is not the magnifying glass that is physically touching me and
imprinting my arm by burning it but the light rays it is magnifying. Thus, if by
index is meant a sign that is physically touched by its object, then neither celluloid-
based nor digital photographs are indexical.
44
OCTOBER 114
41. Bazin, Ontology of the Photographic Image, p. 14. Bazins claim about the ontological identi-
ty of photograph and object has been interpreted differently by different scholars. Daniel Morgan
argues that Bazin is literally denying that there is an ontological distinction between image and
object, although he admits that he is unable to offer a coherent formulation of this claim (Morgan,
Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics, Critical Inquiry 32 [Spring 2006], pp. 45051).
Much more plausibly, Jonathan Friday has suggestedgiven that Bazin himself stated that no one
believes any longer in the ontological identity of model and image (Bazin, Ontology of the
Photographic Image, p. 10)that Bazins claim should be construed as a phenomenological one
about the way photographs present themselves to consciousness (Friday, Andr Bazins Ontology of
Photographic and Film Imagery, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63, no. 4 [Fall 2005], p. 340).
42. Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, p. 136.
43. Ibid.
44. Even if the photochemical surface inside a celluloid-based camera is somehow touched by the
objects in front of the camera by way of the light rays that bounce off those objects and react with it,
this would still mean that many celluloid-based photographs are not indexical, given that most such
photographs are prints taken from negatives and have not themselves been in physical contact with
the objects they depict via the light rays reflected off those objects.
It might be argued that, unlike digital photographs, celluloid-based pho-
tographs are indexical in the sense that they are physical traces of their objects
even though their objects dont physically touch them. After all, something can
leave behind a physical trace of itself on a surface without actually touching that
surface. I can, for example, write my name in the sand using a stick or on a black-
board using a piece of chalk. I can also use a magnifying glass to focus light rays
onto a tree trunk and burn my name into it. In none of these cases am I touching
these surfaces or the signs I imprint on them, even though I am leaving behind
physical traces of myself. Similarly, someone might claim, an object leaves behind
a physical trace of itself on a photochemical surface when light bounces off that
object, is focused by the lens onto the photochemical surface inside a camera, and
reacts with that surface. Meanwhile, in the case of a digital camera, the light
reflected off an object in front of the camera is detected by a light sensor inside it
and translated into a binary code that is stored on a hard drive or some other stor-
age device. There is thus no surface on which to leave a physical trace. The
digital, writes Doane, represents the vision (or nightmare) of a medium without
materiality, of pure abstraction incarnated as a series of 0s and 1s, sheer presence
and absence, the code. Even light, that most diaphanous of materialities, is trans-
formed into numerical form in the digital camera.
45
However, as the example of
writing ones name on a surface demonstrates, traces can be left behind in a sym-
bolic code, so this alone does not disqualify digital photographs from being
indexical. A seismograph and an electrocardiograph translate their objectsthe
movement of the ground and heartbeatsinto symbolic codes, but this does not
stop them from recording traces of their objects (as does a barometer, one of
Peirces examples of an index). And, as Matthew Kirschenbaum has argued, it is
demonstrably false that the digital is a medium without materiality:
Electronic textuality is [physically] locatable, even though we are
not accustomed to thinking of it in physical terms. Bits can be mea-
sured in microns when recorded on a magnetic hard disk. They can
be visualized with technologies such as magnetic force microscopy
(MFM), which is a variation on the scanning tunneling microscope
(STM). When a CD-ROM is burned, a laser superheats a layer of dye
to create pits and lands, tiny depressions on the grooved surface of
the platter. The length of these depressions is measured in microns,
their width and depth in nanometers.
46
Data stored electronically using digital media is just as much an inscribed trace, an
intervention in or modification of a physical substratum, as a name written on a
blackboard or burned onto a tree trunk.
47
When a bit is written to a hard drive, for
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 115
45. Doane, The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity, p. 142.
46. Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), p. 3.
47. Ibid., pp. 5859.
example, it is converted to a voltage that is passed through the drives read/write
head where the current creates an electromagnetic field reversing the polarity of not
one but several individual magnetic dipolesa whole pattern of flux reversals
embedded in the material substrate of the disk.
48
New-media theorists, according to
Kirschenbaum, often overlook the physical processes and inscriptions involved in
electronically storing data such as digital photographs on hard drives and other
devices in part because these processes are invisible to the naked human eye, and in
part because such theorists tend to buy into the myth of such datas being purely
abstract and immaterial. But just because something is invisible does not mean it
is not there. Digital photographs are just as much non-contact physical traces of their
objects as celluloid-based ones, even though those traces cannot be seen with the
naked human eye.
They are also mechanically generated non-contact physical traces, which is
why digital photographs can be as ontologically realistic and epistemically reli-
able as celluloid-based ones. The evidential authority of photography lies,
according to Gregory Currie, in the fact that a camera, when working properly,
is independent of the intentional states of its operator in the sense that it
records what is in front of it, not what the cameraperson thinks or believes is in
front of it. By contrast, however reliable and accurate, a handmade representa-
tional image such as a painting depicts what its maker thinks or believes is in
front of him or her. Hence a photograph can, for example, record something
that the cameraperson is unaware of while taking the photograph, such as an
unseen person.
49
All of this is true of digital photography too, which is why
newspapers such as the New York Times publish digital photographs as visual evi-
dence of the news they are reporting. Of course, as many have argued, it is
easier to alter photographs undetected and create photorealistic images of non-
existent things using computer software than it is with celluloid-based processes,
and this might mean that digital photographs lack the evidential weight of tra-
ditional photographs.
50
But as Gunning has argued in a text that deserves to be
widely read because of its level-headedness about these (and other) matters,
traditional photography . . . also possesses processes that can attenuate, ignore,
or even undo the indexical, as famous hoaxes using celluloid-based pho-
tographs attest .
51
Thus, the difference bet ween digit al and film-based
photography cannot be described as absolute.
52
Rather than a break with tradi-
tional celluloid-based photography, Gunning concludes, correctly in my view,
that the introduction of digital technologies should be seen as akin to earlier
OCTOBER 116
48. Ibid., p. 89.
49. Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), pp. 5455.
50. Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, p. 70.
51. Tom Gunning, Whats the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs, Nordicom Review 12
(2004), p. 41.
52. Ibid.
technological developments in the practice and art of photography, such as the
conquering of exposure time with instantaneous photography.
53
Jacobs is not wrong, therefore, to believe that he can continue to touch the
past in his digital videos, at least in the sense that the celluloid-based footage and
photographs he uses in them remain physical non-contact traces of their subjects
despite having been digitized and then manipulated using computer software.
54
Nor has the move to digital brought about a rupture in Jacobss practice, although
its affordability and ease of use have made him a more prolific filmmaker. Rather,
as William Rose has pointed out, digital technologies have enabled Jacobs to
emulate and expand the visual effects developed in his celluloid-based Nervous
System performances and preserve them on digital video (which is perhaps one
reason Jacobs ceased these performances upon switching to digital).
55
A good
example is eternalism, Jacobss patented method for creating an illusion of sus-
t ained, ongoing mot ion with a degree of three- dimensionalit y.
56
Jacobs
pioneered eternalism in his Nervous System performances by projecting two
almost identical film frames from two prints of the same film. As Rose describes it,
An exterior shutter, in the form of a spinning propeller positioned between the
two projectors, is used to rapidly alternate between, and blend together, the two
frames by interrupting the projections with imageless intervals.
57
Jacobs fre-
quently achieves the effect of eternalism in his digital videos by quickly switching
back and forth between two slightly different representational images from a film
or stereograph and a third black image, which is why he has been able to adapt
some of his Nervous System performances to digital video.
58
It is not just visual effects from these performances that Jacobs has imitated and
extended on digital video, however. He also uses computer software to imitate the
techniques for drawing the viewers attention to overlooked details of the moving
image that he employed in Tom, Tom, The Pipers Son, as can be shown by briefly com-
paring the film to one of Jacobss digital reconsiderations of the original Tom, Tom,
appropriately titled Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008). As Jacobs has noted, the
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 117
53. Ibid., p. 48.
54. It might be objected that Jacobss digital videos are traces of traces. While the found footage
and photographs he uses in them are traces of the subjects they depict, once this found material is dig-
itized, the resulting digital videos are traces of this found material, not the subjects it depicts. This is
because these digital videos are not direct recordings of those subjects but rather direct recordings of
the original celluloid-based recordings, themselves direct, of those subjects. However, if this is true,
then it is also true of most film prints, which are, like most celluloid-based photographs, taken from
negatives and are not themselves direct recordings of the subjects they depict.
55. William Rose, Annotated Filmography and Performance History, in Optic Antics, p. 265.
56. Ken Jacobs, Eternalism, a method for creating an appearance of sustained three-dimension-
al motion-direction of unlimited duration, using a finite number of pictures, U.S. Patent 7218339,
May 15, 2007.
57. Rose, Annotated Filmography and Performance History, p. 270.
58. For example, the Nervous System performance Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy (1997) has
been released on digital video as Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy; Bye, Molly (2005).
staging and cutting of the 1905 Tom, Tom is pre-Griffith.
59
When the film was
made, American filmmakers were only just beginning to develop the mise-en-scne
and variable framing conventions for ensuring narrative clarity that would come to
predominate in Hollywood cinema from the 1910s onward. Each event is filmed in
what appears to be a single shoteight in totalwith the stationary camera posi-
tioned at some distance from the action perpendicular to the painted sets. While the
narratively important characters tend to be placed closest to the camera in the mid-
dle of the settings, there are no zooms, camera movements, or cut-ins to closer views
to render their actions clearly visible. As a result, especially during the first crowded
shot, which contains approximately twenty characters competing for the viewers
attention, one cannot help but miss much of what is happening. This includes the
narratively crucial event of Tom stealing the pig, which is almost completely hidden
behind a juggler bending down to pick up his dropped balls. Jacobs reports that
when he first watched the film he did not see the theft of the pig, and, since he was
unacquainted with the nursery rhyme on which the film is based, it seemed to him
that the chase that ensues had no recognizable purpose at all.
60
In filming the screen on which the original Tom, Tom was projected for his
1969 film, Jacobs used techniques of variable framing that American filmmakers
began employing shortly after the 1905 Tom, Tom was made. As Nol Carroll has
pointed out, variable framing allows filmmakers to control the viewers attention
to a much greater degree than is possible in the other visual arts.
61
To use
Carrolls terminology, by zooming in or moving the camera toward an object, a
OCTOBER 118
59. Jacobs, Program Notes, in Films That Tell Time, p. 22.
60. Jacobs, Beating My Tom Tom, p. 6.
61. Nol Carroll, The Power of Movies, in Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Jacobs. Tom, Tom,
The Pipers Son.
196971.
filmmaker can index it, suggesting to the viewer that he pay attention to it, much
like the gesture of pointing. These techniques can also exclude or bracket what
surrounds the object, so that the viewer literally cannot pay attention to anything
else onscreen. They also change the scale of an object so that it fills up more
screen space, which further suggests that the object should be attended to by the
viewer or forces the viewer to do so. Jacobs uses variable framing in tandem with
slowing, stopping, reversing, and repeating the film to reveal not just occluded
narrative events such as the theft of the pig but easily missed details of the actors
performances along with properties and perceptual effects of celluloid film that
have little or no relevance to the narrative.
Consider the theft of the pig, which is the first event Jacobs scrutinizes fol-
lowing the projection of the original Tom, Tom in its entirety. He begins with a
medium shot of the legs of the character whom Jacobs has come to call Little Billy
as he moves around at the front of the crowd until he is approached by someone
who hands him the pig on a leash. Jacobs then cuts to a wider shot of a still frame
of Tom looking at the pig, briefly advances the film, and then stops it again to
reveal Tom once more gazing at the pig. After an extreme close-up of the image in
which only slowly moving light, shadow, and film grain are discernible, Jacobs cuts
back to a medium shot of the juggler and Tom followed by a long shot of the two
that includes Little Billy and a few onlookers. Slowly, Jacobs advances the film as
the juggler begins his act, moves forward in front of Tom to retrieve his dropped
balls, and Tom turns and runs away from the camera toward the back of the set
with the pig, Little Billy following closely behind. After a shot of the films title,
Jacobs returns to a still frame, again in long shot, of the juggler standing in front
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 119
Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The
Pipers Son. 196971.
of Tom, having just picked up his balls, and he cuts to ever closer shots of Tom
barely visible behind the juggler. Slowly, he advances the film as Tom and Little
Billy, now in close-up, turn and run. Jacobs next moves even closer to the image
and, stopping the film once more, tilts the camera up and down Little Billys body.
He slowly advances the film again as the onlookers begin chasing the boys, only
their legs visible, and, having stopped the film, he zooms out to reveal the juggler,
now alone on the set. Most of these details are extremely difficult to apprehend
when watching the original, but Jacobss variable framing makes them clearly visi-
ble by bracketing the onlookers, enlarging Tom, Little Billy, and the Juggler, and
indexing their actions.
2008s Return to the Scene of the Crime, unlike its celluloid predecessor, con-
sists exclusively of an examination of the first crowded shot of the 1905 Tom,
Tom; the theft of the pig, which Jacobs now equates with the financial crisis that
began in 2008, occurs at its end instead of toward the beginning. In addition to
eternalisms, Jacobs uses digital effects that have no equivalents in the 1969 film.
For example, as the juggler, whom Jacobs now refers to as God, performs in
front of the crowd, his balls are replaced by frames from the film, which circle
above him with increasing rapidity until Jacobs freezes the image. Nevertheless,
interspersed with such purely digital effects is a use of variable framing to
uncover yet more details of the original. As God begins to juggle, several shots
from different dist ances reveal him grabbing his crotch, thereby further
unearthing the films sexual subtext, which has long fascinated Jacobs. And
when he bends down to retrieve his balls, Jacobs slows the action by advancing
OCTOBER 120
Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The
Pipers Son. 196971.
Jacobs. Tom, Tom, The
Pipers Son. 196971.
Jacobs. Return to the
Scene of the Crime. 2008.
through a series of eternalisms one frame at a time and zooming in for a closer
view. This repetition of frames enables the viewer to closely study the event. An
intertitle directs the viewer to pay attention to Toms theft of the pig behind
God, and after a brief long shot and another intertitle, Jacobs cuts back to the
moment prior to the theft when Tom and Little Billy, now centered in the
frame, are watching the juggling. A medium shot of God and Tom is followed by
a medium close-up of their heads as God bends down to pick up his balls and
Tom steals the pig. Jacobs then repeats the footage of Tom and Little Billy
watching the juggling in a wider shot and, with Tom centered in the frame, slows
it down as God moves forward and Tom grabs the leash of the pig. Jacobs cuts to
a still frame of God bent down in front of Tom, zooms in, and then cuts to an
even closer view before zooming out. For good measure, he repeats the theft
one final time in a long shot using eternalisms. Of course, the camera is not
really zooming, moving, or cutting in to closer views in this digital video, as
there is no lens, camera, or film to cut. Rather, digital software is emulating
these celluloid-based techniques. Yet their function is the sameto make easily
overlooked details of the original evident by indexing and enlarging them, and
bracketing distracting information.
Much like t he filmmaker s discussed by John Power s and Feder ico
Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist 123
Jacobs. Return to
the Scene of the
Crime. 2008.
Windhausen elsewhere in this issue of October, Jacobs is using digital technologies
to imitate techniques he first honed in his celluloid-based work. To be sure, he is
also creating digital effects that have no equivalents in that work, thereby expand-
ing his practice in new directions. But while these effects might be new, their
underlying purpose remains the sameto create an adventure of perception for
viewers. Inasmuch as this adventure continues to involve making visible truths
about images and their contents that are partially or wholly invisible to human
sight, Jacobs is extending the venerable tradition of revelationism, which origi-
nated in the silent era of celluloid-based cinema, into the digital age.
OCTOBER 124