Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)

In Anaglyph Tom Ken Jacobs revisits the 1905 source of his 1969 structuralist film masterpiece, Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son. In his earlier film, a landmark of cinematic deconstruction, Jacobs re-photographed and manipulated a film fragment from the dawn of cinema, penetrating the image to reach the sublime. In Anaglyph Tom, the artist applies the anaglyph 3D process to the original footage, engaging the experience of depth perception itself as the subject of his relentless experimentation. Reanimating the past through digital manipulation, Jacobs again summons the celluloid ghosts and lost worlds of an earlier age, subjecting them to his dizzying interventions and immersing the viewer. Throbbing and flickering, pulsing and stuttering, his work plunges the viewer into haunted scenes that come alive with illusory depth and movement. (3D glasses will be supplied.)
Writes Jacobs: ‘The real subject of Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) is depth-perception itself. Our beloved performers from the 1905 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son again encapsulate human absurdity for our amusement but this time in illusionary (and berserk) 3D. Clowns and harlots and slumming gentry freely step forward and back through the screen surface, often misplacing heads and limbs as they change location.’ (www.eai.org)