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THE
GUESTS
1999; installation by Ken and Flo Jacobs (74 min. continuous cycle)
based on Lumiere’s ENTREE D’UNE NOCE A L’EGLISE
(10 sec. section).
3-D Derangements:
Flo’s parents were visiting and I was projecting color home
movies of Nisi and Aza when they were little. The films were silent
but not the grandparents. They leaned forward in their seats, smiling
widely and calling to the kids, attempting to get their attention;
with their arms reaching towards the dinky pull-up screen they were
waving the kids closer, exactly as when the kids had been little.
After each short reel they’d return to themselves with no
embarrassment. It was funny, and not so funny.
I go in and out of similar delusion watching THE GUESTS. Here (here?),
in 1896, are some of the first people to look a movie camera in
the eye. Lens. Movie-viewers in the eye. Eyes. Could any of them
have figured that this time-fragment of the everyday -shuffling
into church after the wedding party- was here to stay? In a way?
They appear so tangible. Thoughtful, inquisitive, amused, or oblivious
of the camera as they go on about their business during their confident
term of residency on the planet (renters all, like us). We see the
people in the background move with intent, going somewhere. But
some up close, stalled in the slow-moving line, direct their gaze
piercingly towards us. “Hey!”, I want to say, “We’re
looking back at you.” Face pressed to face on each side of
the great divide. “We can read some of your thoughts.”
Cinema is truly a crazy-making machine.
I’m drawn, in my work, to exacerbate the situation. I allow
the figures a flirtation with corporeality. 2-D into 3-D can make
the figures all the more there, there so it hurts. And then -like
a child stacking and then tumbling play blocks- I might snap the
figures flat again, or wrench and twist the depth they participate
in into contradictions of depth as we know it, fragmenting and mixing
background/foreground/solid/open so that only now and again are
things placed in space in the orderly progression of diminishing
forms we’ve become comfortable with in life.
Sometimes our brains do not wish to acknowledge what our eyes are
reporting, they “correct”, loosely tossing the expected
impression over the unsettling sight. Then we have to look hard
to determine exactly to where in depth a particular screen-area
has been placed/displaced for the moment (it may change in a moment),
and does it appear solid or open no matter what in actuality it
represents and how we know such a thing should appear. Look hard,
until the “correction” lifts and eyes pinpoint The Impossible.
Volumes of air infiltrate. But someone will have a tiny head, tiny
because distinctly forward of a normal-sized head. And then that
head might invert, sink back into and merge with one of the little
distant shops that line the plaza. A miniature horse-drawn carriage
hangs suspended alongside a shoulder. The brocade adorning a lady’s
dress may be afloat in space before her, off on its own, while the
folds of her skirts take on a sculptural independence of identity
making them unidentifiable as skirts. Her accouterments no longer
shore up her presence, leaving here where? this lady, so placid,
so dismembered. Suddenly the sculptural intrusion into the scene
(that had been her skirts) improperly opens to appear as a shaft
where no shaft could be. Hapless cine-semblances stepping into 1999
as into a midsummer’s night place of whimsical enchantment.
Two Impossibles tangle, exacerbate and perhaps also neutralize each
other: the original Impossible, that of the present that was 1896
Paris happening before us (we are impossible guests in each other’s
presents), and my 3-D derangements. Crazy on crazy, funny and not
so funny.
The first half of the Lumiere shot, bride and groom and parents
coming forward to enter the church, comprise the visuals of my live
Nervous System film-performance COUPLING (1996). THE GUESTS picks
up on the action, using a different 2-D into 3-D method, exactly
where COUPLING lets off.
Method:
Two
eyes set apart, two perspectives with figures in the field shifting
left and right increasingly as things approach, make for perception
(not mere understanding, as from a photograph) of depth. But the
original Lumiere film -raided for THE GUESTS- was a single fixed-camera
shot; one perspective. 3-D from a single 2-D film-strand, how? The
answer is that all deep-space activity we now see in this work results
from movement, the once real-life shifting not so much forward and
back as left and right of people and things as recorded movie frame
to movie frame, with the resulting character of depth only sometimes
resembling space as it was lived before the Lumiere camera. Two
identical film prints of the shot, cut apart and mounted onto separate
35mm slides containing two film frames each (a movie frame being
half the height of a 35mm slide), are shown simultaneously, overlaid
onscreen one upon the other slightly out of synch. Optical separation
of the superimposed images is made possible by opposing Polaroid
filtering of the two projector-beams of light, bounced off the silver
screen and sorted one light-display to each eye via corresponding
Polaroid spectacles. The similarities and differences between images
from different positions in time now undergo the same process of
lightning mental calculation normally accorded the differences that
arise from having some 2 1/2 inches of space between our eyes,
producing perception of depth. Otherworldly as it may be.
I developed
this method of perfectly skittish and undependable 3-D from 2-D
in 1975, employing it in my first live film-performance, THE IMPOSSIBLE:
Chapter One: Southwark Fair (based on the 1905 Billy Bitzer TOM,
TOM, THE PIPER’S SON). It was Flo’s idea/instigation/persistent
urging to again use the method in a stand-alone installation, and
we’ve worked together on it every inch of the way. -Ken Jacobs
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