Group Hallucinations: Anger, Jacobs, Snow

In Michael Snow's SSHTOORRTY (“short” layered over “story”) (Canada, 2005, 20 mins, In Farsi with English subtitles) a three-minute scene is repeated twelve times but with the second half superimposed over the first half (as suggested by its title), disorienting both the space and the melodramatic scene to create an argument that is constantly beginning and ending. Set to a series of pop songs, Kenneth Anger's Mouse Heaven (2004, 10 mins) details an obsessive collection of early Mickey Mouses, foregrounding Anger's ongoing fascination with popular culture and paying tribute to a character he has loved since childhood as, in his words, a “kind of demon 'fetish' figure.” Ken Jacobs describes his Mountaineer Spinning (2004, 26 mins), a digital record of his live Nervous Magic Lantern performance: “We seem to be seeing a rustic landscape, perhaps. Everything here seems to be a ‘perhaps.' As in real life, everything is in constant motion. The question of what we are looking at becomes of less urgency than . . . when and how did it become what a moment ago it was not. It might be best to think of what you and others see as a group hallucination.” Followed by New York Street-Trolleys 1900 (1999, 11 mins), which explains Jacobs's Nervous System Performances.

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