Ken Jacobs • United States • 2007 • Not featured on Kino Lorber's Blu-ray set.
In Jacobs’s words—“Razzle Dazzle is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space. They look out—from their place at the start of the 20th century—with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive. We observe them but of course they see nothing of this, our America, hopelessly gone to rot, its mountaintops leveled for extraction of coal, rivers and air polluted, crisscrossed everywhere with property-lines; they don't see its prisons or the corporations leaning in from their off-shore tax-bases to see what more they can take. Early stereopticon images also appear, digitally manipulated to reveal their depths. A digital shadow falls upon the scene and yet, grim as things get, as our crimes and failures then and now commingle, the movie proceeds with a cubist/abstract-expressionist zest.”
Up Next in Ken Jacobs
-
Reichstag 9/11
Ken Jacobs • United States • 2016
One of Ken Jacobs's most bracing and controversial works: a reframing of 9/11 marked by the director's belief in government conspiracy.
-
Return to the Scene of the Crime
Ken Jacobs • United States • 2008 • Ken Jacobs' attempt to "seize" Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son.
Ken Jacobs revisits Billy Bitzer’s Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son—which he first disassembled in his 1969 film of the same name—to once again explore the vagaries of the visual and its endless capacity for m...
-
Seeking the Monkey King
Ken Jacobs • United States • 2011 • An investigation of the space between two and three dimensions.
In Jacobs’s words, “The film could have well been called Kicking and Screaming but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste. Once the message kicked in it overrod...
