Ken Jacobs: Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son

Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969) 16mm, color and b&w, silent, 115 min. (16fps)Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print. Reverently examined here, a new movie almost incidentally comes into being.The staging and cutting is pre-Griffith. Seven infinitely complex cine-tapestries comprise the original film and the style is not primitive, not uncinematic, but an inspired indication of a path of cinematic development whose value has only recently been rediscovered. My camera closes in only to better ascertain the infinite richness, searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused, suddenly looks out of an actor’s face), delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream! And then I wanted to show the actual present of film, just begin to indicate its energy. A train of images passes like enough and different enough to imply to the mind that its eyes are seeing an arm lift, or a door close; I wanted to ‘bring to the surface’ that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape…to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself-a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame, each cold still…stirred to life by a successive 16-24 f.p.s. pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!)-K.J. A Tom Tom Chaser (2002) digital, b&w, silent, 10 ½ min. “I do an electronic riff on the MoMA print. The riff was inspired watching Scott Olive, Tape House master technician, zip forward and back on their million dollar optical film-scanner. I asked Scott if we could record some of this discarded visual phenomena incidental to film-to-digital transfer. I stood cheering him on to wilder aberrations -K.J.