Watched yesterday as the old year passed away, and today I have been reading up every Ken Jacobs interview I could find.
He's a very interesting thinker. Here's a little approximate collection of snippets for your reading pleasure
About videogames vs his "indeterminate cinema":
«Yet, experiences like the one manufactured by this game have no place for interpretative or reflective capacities of the human mind. They merely give the illusion of choice, while turning people into automatons. It lends no real freedom to the viewer, or in this case, player. Here it’ s just training and triggering in violence.»
About conventional narration:
«Most movies are coherent. They are fairy tales that lead to something. Movies have resolutions. Many people live at the movies and tolerate fumbling through their real lives. Life is different; it does not seem to lead to anything. It’ s diffuse, yet infinitely penetrable. The difference is between living through the movies and using the movies to enrich your critical engagement with life and the real world. One is an experience that dominates while the other condemns you to be free.»
«Okay. Stories are bedtime stories,they’re simplicities, they’re comfortable to the mind. In real life, there’s no stories. Everything is unending, confusing. Nothing starts and concludes. There’s no beginning, middle and end in the actual experience of our lives, and we want this kind of neat little package, and we make them for ourselves in our stories.»
About mainstream cinema:
«When they walk out of a theatre, they do not talk about what they have experienced. If they like what they see, they will usually say something like, “ wow, that was a good movie, it was exciting,” and that will be it. They are not critical of their experience. Many movies just try to excite passions and tap mechanisms in people - their sexual and violent urges. It feeds thrills to the viewer. That’ s what makes money and discourages critical thought.»
«And disorientation makes you struggle for uprightness again. You have to seek what’s going on: where am I? Then your mind is brought to work, you’re activated. When you talk about suspense in a movie, you know, Hitchcock: Who did it? How does it work out? Will they fall in love? Will they get away? Will they get the jewels? You’re also pushed off balance. A question has been asked. So my questions are different questions. They can literally be questions of physical imbalance.»
«Hitchcock, I thought he was fundamentally a rather evil guy... the great film by Hitchcock, which he seems to have also thought was his best film, was Shadow of a Doubt... it just struck me as, you know, what an amazingly unsympathetic picture of America this was during the war years, of the American soldier, of the American town. You know, is this really worth fighting for, [worth] saving? And my essential feeling about this guy, once you get into this thing, is that he could survive in any regime. You know, he’s just very clever... Communism, Nazism, Capitalism. He’d make himself comfortable.»
«I do every so often see the sort of films that startle me and I admire them, but I see them as photoplay. As sensitively film visualized theater. And that’s not my deepest interest in films. I’m very interested, very receptive to early talkies, from the first four or five years of sound, before the Code came in, the censorship mostly driven by the Catholic church. And I find in the early sound films that there’s air in a lot of them. There’s a sense of visiting a breathing world. And then things close up and become airless studio productions, more and more, for a long time.»
«Eric von Stroheim film Greed... was amazing... was what remained of, I think, maybe a seven and a half hour movie, which people in the studios had looked at and said, this is the greatest film ever made, and then decided to cut it down into normal consumer size. And I am quite sure it was at that moment I said, this is not the way to go. If I’m going to make something I want its feet to be there, and its head and its arms and legs, and all those little fingers... I think it was essentially, MGM had just organized itself and I think there was a statement that film was now to be put on a rational, factory basis. Enough with the geniuses, okay. We don’t want the geniuses. And now everybody will understand: you’re a director, you’re a writer, you do this. Forget about having a vision. And some people have been able to survive and really do work that swings. Early Capra is pretty astonishing. Later Capra I despise.»
About the art market:
«... this is an art that essentially was called sensational. And that’s what it was designed to do, get attention. The work is instrumental to getting attention, which also means getting money, okay, getting talked about. So one aims, not at the work, not at the character of the material, [but] "How are we going to get attention?" Well you do that by confronting social taboos. You offend people in an interesting way. You get in their way, you get in their face. And I think this is a crappy art. »
«I think things changed with Andrew Warhol. It was understood by him in a very realistic way, this is a business. And that’s what I think a lot of students are learning now. It’s a business, what kind of gimmick can you find to go in this thing and make a killing?»
«[In Monaco] people rent an apartment, or buy an apartment... it gives them a supposed residency in a place where they don’t have to pay taxes, no inheritance taxes. Fantastic. And then these rich, rich, rich, rich people amuse themselves. It’s the Masque of the Red Death twenty-four hours a day.»
About our perception of reality:
«Most people do not question their world. They think that the world that exists today is the only one that has ever existed and that what they are shown is all that exists. Artwork shows other possibilities, it is another language. It is an enigma. The art that I make is not about messages. It is about presenting enigmas.»
«The world of most Hollywood movies is seamless from movie to movie. You could just pass from movie to movie like subway stations... Hollywood, for the most part, produces whatpeople expect, a consistent Hollywood movie. It’s going to vary in the story, it’s going to vary in many different ways, but it is an agreed upon idea of the world that’s actually very arbitrary. It becomes natural to us at a particular time and place in space and history. But then you see things that are "dated" and you see how really arbitrary this idea of normalcy is. I don’t really believe in that norm... so I’m going for my own norm.»
«I’m all for them [his students]. But I do recognize that a lot of them have been totally won over to the culture of entertainment. They are ahistorical. They know celebrities’ names.»
About what's the use of doing art:
«Well, for me, it’s art for art’s sake. Art for the mind’s sake, as I said before, to me the mind is always in the making, and this is the most extraordinary thing about we humans... And you save the world, you save the kids of Baghdad by making a work that is — I can’t say it better than this — vital. Now it might not be vital to social issues, but it’s vital in itself. It’s an achievement of vitality. It’s alive.»
«I want it to have a vitality, and at the same time, I understand it’s transient, the way we are transient. But I don’t want to push that transiency. I want to linger as long as possible, I want the work to linger and hang on as long as possible. This whole thing, the whole phenomena of life is transient. It’s humiliating that it should be debased while we’re given this long, wonderful moment to look around, and for the world to be aware of itself through us. Because as far as we know, there’s no other awareness out there. It’s just machine parts scattered in space.»
«I’m very aware that these are not just shots these are things, life, that happened in front of the camera... I feel it’s enough for me, for ourselves in our moment to see what the truth of our transience and vulnerability is. That it’s one transience looking at another transience and being able to see a kind of a reflection of itself and to feel for that state of transience. For one transient moment to feel for another transient moment.»
«[Film] can make us think, but I don’t mean think about this and think about that. The very, very process of powerful thinking, in a way that it can afford, is I think very, very valuable. I basically think that the mind is not complete yet, that we are working on creating the mind. Okay. And that the higher function of art for me is its contribution to the making of mind... And there’s lots against keeping the mind alive. We are surrounded, inundated, with bullshit. Okay. From almost everywhere. Advertising, which is a euphemism for lying... this just eats up the mind and makes us stupid. And stupid is also moving away from existence. We lose a hold on existence.»
«Move towards what’s vital for you. Forget categories, a career, a life, move in a path where you feel you’re moving towards more life, more being. Smell it out. Make errors. Pick yourself up and go at it again... Film is, and you’re really studying existence, film is mysterious as much as anything else is. Break away from being an expert in your life. Forget about being an expert. Forage. Struggle to go with it. And don’t have a premature idea of who you are. You are in a state of becoming. You don’t know what your actual potentials are. Don’t buy a personality off the rack. Don’t be allured by the latest fashion in interesting celebrities. Take your time, don’t define yourself too early.»
About painting vs cinema:
«Time in painting is more interesting because the time pivots on one single image, which is timeless. I should say this, once you see a film it collects in your mind into a single image also. It’s all there at once, which is what a painting is. It’s all there at once. You can look at a painting and begin going off and seeing it in many different ways, experiencing it in many different ways. And so it does reach out into time, an unfixed time. But in a similar way for me, a film that you’ve seen and really taken into mind does also become an image, a single shape and form. And separates from clock time. I mean, they both seize the mind, or they can seize the mind, and they shape the mind and they become the mind. Cinema is a form of thinking. Painting is a form of thinking.»
«One of the things I like about film, my area of film, there’s almost no rewards... Almost everybody that does it has to make a living elseways, no matter what kind of fame they have. Because they don’t have a unique object that can be bid up at Christie’s»
«Energy excited by pounding extremes: black/white, light/no light. Using the flicker elicits energy. In painting when you try to paint absolute polarities of light and dark in the world, the only way to get close to that with paint is by placing black next to white to make the white seem whiter and visa versa. Compared to actual black and actual white in the world they’re jokes.»
About himself:
«And so I had very little money but I could go to the Museum of Modern Art for thirty cents or something. I would traipse after the lecturers and learn some things. I was very bewildered, however, but very attracted. And one day I had to go to the bathroom, which was in the basement, but it was also a homosexual pick up joint. But I had to go. So I went there and then noticed that there was a theater down there. Of all things, there was a movie theater there. That this was a museum that showed film! And I began seeing the films.»
«Conversation doesn’t happen so much anymore. People go through mostly a ritual of signals. I remember conversing more and needing to.»
About his live performances:
«The Nervous System, it’s two projectors... usually what I’m doing is pitting different frames of two prints of the same film against each other. At the same time I don’t like superimposition... superimposition usually for me just means I have one image. You know, each image confuses the other so it’s a very, very weak image. And what’s happening is that I have this propeller set up in front of, in between the projectors, which is moving, alternating the images. So you have this kind of thing going, but also its possible to work this so the two images don’t just vibrate against each other, they merge in very, very strange and mysterious ways. It’s possible to create continuous movements with these two frames from the same film... in many cases, to bring them into three dimensions.»
«I had no idea of being a "performance artist" or whatever, but I was performing, at home, and sometimes for friends, girlfriends. Oh yes, performance. I envied the jazz players because they had a social life. As a painter, and a filmmaker, it was very lonely. But if you played jazz, and you played with other people — you met girls! And here I am, performing, and married.»
«These words abstract are really not satisfying for me... these works are all very, very experiential. They’re very involved in the immediate for me. They really rise out of crises.»
«... the low light levels change the temperature of the projection bulbs. And when they change the temperature they change the color. So these very elusive strange shiftings of color take place in normally what would be called black and white film. I’m making use of different color temperatures coming from the bulbs.»
About "Tom Tom the piper's son":
«Ten minutes time, for the original, is horizontal reckoning, okay? But, each of those things is penetrable —or at least I discovered they were penetrable — and up for further, deeper seeing and transformation. Deeper revealing than what zips by in ten minutes. So to me that really isn’t seeing, it’s storytelling. So you’ve got this story, and you think you’ve got this whole phenomena, but you don’t at all. That takes some love-making, you have to really get embroiled with it. You have to tango with it. Then you begin to see — wow, that’s a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff is going on.»
«Ghosts! Cine-recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead... 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 frame-per-second pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite...»
Ken.Jacobs.-.Tom.Tom.the.piper's.son.avi 
