Digital Lantern Dances

IFFR 2004-Filmmaker in Focus returns with for the first time digital versions of his so far unique and rare live events. Nisi Jacobs videotaped the performances. Both titles are also new works, and are not suitable for people prone to epileptic seazures! In Mountaineer Spinning, we seem to be seeing a rustic landscape, perhaps. Everything here seems to be a perhaps, including allusions to Beauty and The Beast and whether we are or are not seeing in 3D. As in real life, everything is in constant motion. Rick Reed does the Mendelssohn and here too lines are blurred between life-recording and astral electrons at play.The second digital Magic Lantern performance sounds very different. These are selections from four live performances by musician John Zorn assisted by Ikue Mori (improvising on laptops) in May and October of 2004 at Anthology Film Archives in New York. The viewer of Nervous Magic Lantern phenomena plunges, hovers, sinks and rises into illusionistic 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. In between those longer pieces a short film, New York Street-Trolleys, in which the Nervous System Performance is explained. (K.J.)