Director: Ken Jacobs. Country: USA. Year: 2007.
Ken Jacobs spends almost ninety minutes digitally taking apart and exploring A.C. Abadie’s 1903 short for the Edison company Razzle Dazzle in as many ways as one can imagine only to reach the conclusion that there are nearly an infinite amount of details of motion, distortion, horror, surprise, and secrets in any given amount of moving film.
Abadie’s single-shot short is of a fairground ride that is a gigantic suspended circle, upon which ride mostly children and some adults, and is spun and tilted around and around by men pushing the orbital ring. The oscillation of the ring as it approaches the camera and recedes gives an almost three dimensional sense of space to the film, one which Jacobs becomes fascinated with. He juxtaposes the false sense of dimensionality of this short with stereopticon photographs (the ones where binoculars combine two images taken adjacently to produce an optical illusion of three-dimensionality) which he cleverly edits together, cutting rapidly back and forth between the two images so that they appear animated. Coupled with additional digital warping (the entire film is digitally made, processed, and projected) makes these “still” photographs almost look like the camera is moving around a three dimensional object, unlike the clips of Razzle Dazzle which for all its false dimensions is but a flat projection. Meanwhile, Abadie’s short is being endlessly explored: for the most part changing the color scheme to a bleeding red, white and black, Jacobs deeply zooms in, stutters motion, slows it down, performs picture in picture, overlaps the footage with slower or faster footage, and so on.
As in Lars von Trier’s excerpts and remakes of Jørgen Leth’s short in The Five Obstructions we never see the source material in its original form all the way through, though a tantalizing glimpse of unaltered, unzoomed footage about fifteen minutes in becomes an unexpected physical relief on the eyes. All the manipulations find unique elements inside what seems like the limited motion and content of Abadie’s beautiful but simple film, everything from miniscule human gestures to abstractions of shapes and movement beyond recognition. These often tilt towards the horrific; zoomed in so far, the colors saturated and warped, and the footage slowed down to grotesque levels of distortion, often times the human faces seem to melt, the eyes turning hollow and ghastly very much like a nightmarish Edvard Munch character.
These silent, screaming figures that seem to erupt from the footage or more likely lurk beneath its surface gaiety are reflected in the turn the film takes in its last third, moving most overtly away from all the varied and repeated manipulation of Razzle Dazzle and moving towards a montage of the stereopticon images, almost all dealing with war (specifically the Spanish-American war of this proto-cinematic era), the soundtrack quoting Edison’s “first” recording of his voice in giving his support to what sounds like American intervention into World War I, and a final use of the three dimension effect to bubble out a pile of skulls as eerie and undercutting as Holbein’s implicitly referenced optical illusion in The Ambassadors.
To what end is all this? It is not clear; the film’s burrowing absorption with Abadie’s short and experimentation with digital manipulation (much of it inspired, some of it unfortunately baring the marks of someone not used to the conventions of computer imagery—some of the three dimensional uses Abadie’s short with spheres, squares, and receding imagery looks awkward and dated) is indeed alarmingly painful, exhilarating, tiresome, revelatory, rhythmic, and fascinating in and of itself, as much about film texture (and the digital texture of film) as it is about Abadie’s specific photographic content. The connection with the optical view of the life inside the film with its digital manipulation, and its comparison to the more surreally paradoxical “still lives” from stereopticons, unreally animated into partial movement, lightly touches on phenomenological questions about cinema as a medium. There is a strange gap in the idea and perception that the still images, taking place over space (next to one another) cognitively approximate real life better than the two-dimensional Razzle Dazzle.
Yet Abadie’s short, taking place over time, provides real movement that can only be simulated in Jacob’s manipulation of the stereopticon (just like the 3D effect of the short is likewise only approximated digitally). And it seems like it is movement in time rather than space that is most interesting overall, as Razzle Dazzle seems to provide an immense catalog of details and moments that the stereopticon lacks in its powerful spatial “thereness”. Yet it is these latter images that call into question most directly and literally the state of the world, both around the time of their creation and now, during another imperialist state of war. This theme’s connection to the Edison film seems mostly tangential, unless one reads some of the horror lurking in the digital, pixilated depths of its images as a kind of implicit acknowledgement that behind any utopist scene or sense lays a suggestion of darkness.
The film may never coalesce—if it was even meant to, though one with so few parts so carefully played with suggests a strong, concrete deliberation—and definitely overstays its welcome, but the amount of visual variety and mystery to be found in an early silent film and the degree to which new technologies can root out and find new pleasures and meanings in an old, perhaps forgotten film is a pleasure to see. The larger questions asked in terms of dimensionality of images and this aesthetic and perceptional notion’s relationship to death, war, and politics, is much less clear but no less stimulating.
Director: Ken Jacobs. Assisted by: Erik Nelson and Florence Jacobs. Director of Thomas A. Edison’s Razzle Dazzle (1903): A.C. Abadie. Country: USA. Year: 2007.
