Phantasmagorical monstrosities pull from the screen. Time doesn't stand still but runs in place. A strident elegy to crazy people. First performed in 1982, The Whole Shebang follows a "Score," making a statement beyond phenomena-display, with room for improvisation. The Nervous System consists, very basically, of two identical prints on two projectors capable of single-frame advance and "freeze" (turning the movie back into a series of closely related slides). The twin prints plod through the projectors, frame...by...frame, in various degrees of synchronization with each other. Most often there's only a single frame difference. Difference makes for movement and, often, three-dimensional space when a shuttling mask or spinning propeller up front, between the projectors, rapidly and repeatedly alternates the cast images. Tiny shifts in the way the two images overlay each other create radically different visual effects. The throbbing flickering (which takes some getting used to) is necessary to create "eternalisms": unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere unlike anything in life (at no time are loops employed). The aim is not life-like or Black Lagoon 3-D illusionism, but to pull a tense plastic play of volume configurations and movements out of standard (2-dimensional) pictorial patterning. Ken Jacobs