Window (1964)

Ken visited Willard [Maas] and Marie [Menken] in their penthouse, and was chewed out by Willard for not having a beginning, middle and end to his films. Willard’s criticisms didn’t upset Ken as they might have earlier in his life; he had begun to feel that there was a general comprehension of his work. He saw that new forms were arising from many people who also had had bitterly insufficient childhoods. The roots of it can be clearly seen in his 1964 film Window. There is nothing to this film whatever if one does not understand what it is to be stuck with your window that looks out on the meanest, cruelest scene—the shabbiest of walls. Your window looks out on the scrubbiest brick and god-damneddest dirty surroundings conceivable. It represents the whole emotional suffering of your life. Your parents are that window to the world, your school is that wall and your spirit has had to live through it. Here is a man up against that window and those walls, making his entire articulation out of this desperation. Window could be thrown out of focus and its very rhythms alone would articulate a meaning. People saw that meaning, the feeling, in Window, and many appreciated it. (Stan Brakhage: Film at Wit’s End)

Mountaineer Spinning (2004)

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 or not] we are or are not seeing in 3-D. As in real life, everything is in constant motion (although unlike life not necessarily going anywhere, more like suspended in motion), achieving or foregoing distinction as specific entities. Rick Reed does the Mendelsohn and here too lines are blurred between life-recording and astral electrons at play. (Ken Jacobs)

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)

Original 1905 film shot and probably directed by G.W. “Billy” Bitzer, rescued via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress. It is most reverently examined here, absolutely loved, with a new movie, almost as a side effect, coming into being. “Ghosts!” Cine recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead. The preservation of their memory ceases at the edges of the frame (a 1905) hand happened to stick into the frame…it’s preserved, recorded in a spray of emulsion grains). One face passes “behind” another on the two dimensional screen. 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 the cleanest, inspired indication of a path of cinematic development whose value has only recently been discovered. My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop character of all movies, recalling with variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savouring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling (a person, confused suddenly looks out of an actors 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 the film, just begin to indicate its energy. 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 … stirred to life by a successive 16–24 pattering on our retinas, the teaming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. (Ken Jacobs/LUX)