New York film artist Ken Jacobs visits the Bay Area for a series of events, including a week-long residency at UC Berkeley. His ongoing profound explorations of the possibilities of cinema include The Nervous System, an innovative 3-D apparatus of his invention which involves exquisite frame-by-frame choreography of found strips of film. At the Pacific Film Archive, he presents two Nervous System film performances and a lecture on painter Hans Hofmann, who was also interested in spatial illusions. In addition, a Nervous System performance of Couplings (corr: Coupling) on October 9, and a matinee performance on October 10 of Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy, will take place at the Headlands Center for the Arts (415-331-2787), cosponsored by San Francisco Cinematheque (415-558-8129). "Jacobs's most systematic and challenging transformation of our relation to the film image comes in the series of performances he calls The Nervous System. These works are as vital and challenging as anything done in the history of avant-garde film....Jacobs's apparatus here is not the camera, but the projector. (The projection apparatus) consists of two analytical projectors which can show the film frame by frame, or freeze it immobile on the screen....By breaking the automatic whir of twenty-four frames a second, Jacobs returns cinema to its prehistory in Marey and Muybridge's analysis of motion....The slightly different film frames, diverted from an illusion of motion by the analytical projectors, begin to produce spatial illusions....The Nervous System plays on our nervous system. Jacobs not only operates his analytic projectors, he also hooks into our most primal processes of perception. Our basic ability to perceive figure and ground, movement out of stillness, to synthesize space and time are played with, as though we were hot-wired to the screen. Space motion, time, and imagery dance before us, eternally breaking apart and coming together. The Nervous System makes great demands on its audience. It focuses our awareness on processes that are usually unconscious, on our own mental contribution to the images of the screen, synthesizing frames into motion and patterns of light and shadow into space. Never has the position of the film spectator been so perilous, the sutures holding the subject/viewer to the screen so radically unstitched."-Tom Gunning, "'Films that Tell Time': The Paradoxes of the Cinema of Ken Jacobs"Ken Jacobs's residency at Berkeley is a project of The Time of Your Life: Enhancing Student Engagement with the Arts, funded by a grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts. Tuesday October 12, 1999
