Ken Jacob Presents: The Subcinema

Artist in Person As subconscious is to conscious. First presented late December 1990 at New York's Collective for Living Cinema of blessed memory. Four works make up the program, plus calculated intermission music. Chronometer: Projection art. Mesh of clockwork sounds by Harrison Birtwistle. "The movie projector's a kind of clock." Ed Batcheller said. Somewhere inside the machine beats a Piranesi space, shaped and given dimension by a string of exposures of a seated woman undulating gravity-free. Who is the alluring lady of this filmstrip tease? I call her Dinah, because the name contains a d, an n, and an a. Dinah Ovum! She is waiting, she is confident, she is radioing for help. Her message: "Let us gestate, love." Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896 (1890s Lumière/1990 Jacobs). Shafting the screen: the projector beam maintains its angle as it meets the screen and keeps on going, introducing volume as well as light, just as the Paris, Cairo, and Venice of a century ago happen to pass. A Pulfrich 3-D film. Phonograph: Sound Picture. The purpose of the audio-amp is to shrink the listener, enabling the listener to poke--via the miniaturized stereo mike--into richly differentiated audio terrains that might otherwise amount to only distant and bland uniformities, the burble, the murmur, the grind. The microphone allows us microscope entrance to where the frequencies sail past or collide. Investigation is the thrill; audio stay-at-homes concern themselves with composition. Better To Be Frightened Than To Be Crushed: In this projection-performance, I align my present fears with those of Edgar Ulmer's when making The Black Cat in 1934. A Universal horror-movie, it isn't so much Boris and Bela that give us the frights as it is Ulmer's exile presentiment--expressed in the oblique way that both poetry and commerce often require--of the endgame passions then erupting in Europe. -- Notes by Ken Jacobs