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Ken Jacobs, Busby Berkeley: |
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This
essay is dedicated to the memory of Ken & Flo Jacobs, who both
died during 2025. Behind
mirrored panes, necessary objects mix with superfluous ones, which
would be more necessary if they didn’t pour forth so abundantly. 1. The
more the relations of the two realities brought together are distant
and fitting, the stronger the image – the more emotive power and
poetic reality it will have. And so it was that my mulling on certain Ken Jacobs works – especially the Capitalism series (Child Labor, 2006; Slavery, 2006), The Surging Sea of Humanity (2006), Return to the Scene of the Crime (2008), Ontic Antics (2005) and Anaglyph Tom (2008) – came into sharp focus when something strange happened to stream past my eyes on television: Busby Berkeley’s set-pieces in Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), a film on which B.B. took (and this was rare) sole directorial credit. The penultimate number to this film, “The Words Are In My Heart” – preceding the better-remembered and more elaborate “Lullaby of Broadway” – offers a typically weird Chinese-box construction: first, Dick Powell serenades his leading lady Gloria Stuart, then an expansive backward-track coupled with a crafty superimposition transforms the lovers into figurines in a small diorama that sits atop a white piano. In this new, second level of the sequence, a woman continues the song as she plays the piano, accompanied by two gal pals. An even craftier transition takes us from what we assumed to be this woman’s hands upon her piano keys to a vast bevy of women, all tinkling away on gleaming white pianos. Eventually, we will return to the second level (the girls retire to bed) and then the first (Dick and Gloria): with so much off-screen time elapsed, the final words of the song dropped (after “even though I can’t say it …”), and a view of the lovers’ kiss reflected in leaf-strewn water, Berkeley has concocted one of his typical filmic double entendres: what the heck have these sweet little things been doing that they ‘can’t say’? But the most striking element of the scene, for my present purpose, is what Berkeley does with all those pianos, what he makes of them. Dozens of them arrayed first on a staircase, then in line-formations, moving in an abstract space with a completely darkened background for high contrast. These pianos (and their female keepers) form themselves into fabulous patterns inside the type of irreal studio-landscape we know well from Berkeley’s career. (3) An IMDb user even praises these pianos for “undulating”, which is literally not the case – but the hallucinatory, suggestive effect is strong. In the most ingenious design moment of this central panel of the musical sequence, a woman is veritably swarmed by pianos that then lock together under her feet like a jigsaw puzzle – thus giving a bigger stage on which to dance. Even odder (or more engaging) to our contemporary gaze is the fact that, at a high point of this display, it almost seems we are watching an educational, animated short about the dual-helical structure of DNA (that is, after the pianos-in-formation have ceased resembling a spinal chord under some unearthly duress), decades before that structure was scientifically divined – and that provides support for another favourite Godard idea, that cinema, in special moments of its intuitive image-making process, prophesises scientific discoveries. Indeed, the great avant-garde, New Zealand-born artist Len Lye claimed specifically to have discovered or intuited the form of the DNA molecule in the hand-drawn animations issuing from his unconscious. (4) It is the extremity of the abstraction here – Lucy Fischer once referred to Berkeley’s standard “plastic abstractions” (5) – that links Berkeley to Jacobs. And also the type of eerie pattern-making – or rather, pattern-finding, since these patterns are always virtual, possible, inherent in the given material. For Berkeley, that involves rotating his mass-pianos in such a way and at the exact speed that the precise tilts of their tops will line up in remarkable, brilliantly foreseen ways, creating new configurations of shape, tone and volume; while for Jacobs, it involves (in Ontic Antics, for instance), splitting the screen and flipping the left-right axis of a frame of Oliver Hardy near a train in such a way and at the exact speed that the bunch of flowers in his hand appears to begin spinning like a top. (Which raises an associative reference we will arrive at later: Dziga Vertov, Mr Spinning Top himself.) Berkeley, too, plays in his own, mise en scènic way with splitting an image down the middle and left/right mirroring, as he does with the pianos in Gold Diggers of 1935. The two filmmakers meet, especially, at the point at which they produce their (very different) kaleidoscopes, a visual form whose importance is stressed (in relation to Berkeley) by Jean-Louis Comolli. Where Berkeley lays them out physically, with bodies and props, Jacobs creates them from splitting, multiplying and arranging parts of pieces of found footage in Anaglyph Tom. (6) And they are linked, lastly, in hallucinatory effects: for what Jacobs animates in those many remarkable, historic stereographs he has collected for so many years would also seem to be “undulating”, frequently – and in at least three dimensions. Like Godard, Jacobs is a filmmaker interested in the (occasional) interface of art exploration and scientific research. Indeed, there are moments when his work appears to bring alive just the sort of example Godard mused upon from the mid ‘70s to the mid ‘80s: to film the movements of crowds or traffic, the living networks of city squares or country roads – or to treat the found image of these things in an appropriately forensic way – would be to somehow reveal some hitherto unknown secret (physical, chemical, social) of their workings. (7) Take a look at Jacobs’ brief The Surging Sea of Humanity, included as a bonus on the New York Fishmarket Ghetto 1903 (2006) DVD. Jacobs takes a stereograph from 1893 of a crowd at an exposition; the caption to the twin-photo provides the film’s title. It is a densely populated and packed image; many of the gentlemen in it look near-identical, thanks to their bowler hats. (Martin Scorsese, who was later to include some Jacobs footage in No Direction Home [2006], staged – in slow motion – a similar sea of bobbing turn-of-the-century hats at a high-mannerist moment of The Age of Innocence [1993].) So Jacobs gets down to working on this image: he creates specific swirls and swarms in it, here, there, and all over. The hats create a fan; the faces make a line. A chap with a curious resemblance to Marcel Proust, dead centre, seems to pop out of the surrounding sea no matter what digital defacement is carried out. Jacobs’ play with stereographic imagery is always systematic but never mechanical; he works the four corners and every zone of the frame, digging out everything there is to find in the initial, indexical image – but there are frequent surprises, leaps to a new level of the game. So, at one point in Surging Sea, Jacobs proceeds to isolate and cut out segments of the image; then he stretches them, expands them, appears to shake them out – as if to dislodge the peculiarities and individualities hidden in the mass. Later, the image will be rotated, by degrees, until it is upside down; from this angle, different qualities of the pictorial density can be emphasised and treated. In the “Words Are In My Heart” sequence, Berkeley offers us, as he so often did, his own intense, bizarre vision of the surging sea of humanity. People are transformed into identical units in a serial chain, twisting, bending and folding, this way and that. Siegfried Kracauer, in his famous reflections on the dance spectacle of the Tiller Girls – live extravaganzas of the late 1920s (but originating in the late 19th century) in which hundreds of women would arrange themselves, methodically and precisely, into “ensembles shaped like stars, like a sea serpent and other interesting and beautiful groups that are refreshing to watch” (as a Busby-watcher wrote in 1933) (8) – diagnosed the “mere linearity” of the arrangement: “[T]he girl-units drill in order to produce an immense number of parallel lines, the goal being to train the broadest mass of people in order to create a pattern of undreamed-of dimensions.” (9) Kracauer was describing, indeed, an early apotheosis of the society of the spectacle: here, ‘the people’ are themselves the performers, each individual indifferent yet essential to the pattern’s completion – and the audience, too, is an integral part of the show, since it is only their (and the camera’s) privileged viewing position in space that can give coherence to the whole. (Little wonder, then, that Kracauer’s notion of “indissoluble girl clusters” (10) would come around for duty again in the wake of the Olympic Games and other sports Opening and Closing spectaculars of the 21st century, whether directed by Zhang Yimou or Baz Luhrmann.) (11) Berkeley managed to translate this kind of grand, perfectionist euphoria of body, mass, pattern, seriality and the ultimate ‘aerial view’ to cinema – indeed, in Ken Russell’s The Boyfriend (1971) and a hundred other slap-happy contemporary musicals, that overhead shot alone serves as the handy pastiche-parody of all that Berkeley stood for within the Hollywood machine. J. Hoberman captures the director’s significance within a wider cultural frame, the “mechanisation of the Broadway revue”, also with reference to Kracauer on the Tiller Girls: Berkeley engineered “a chapter in the history of sex and technology as well as show business”. (12) Yet,
just as Kracauer, in his day, cannily separated the phenomenon of the
Tiller Girls from already standard symptomatic interpretations of a
‘control society’ – its meaning was not to be reduced to
“military exercises” or even “gymnastic discipline” –
we cannot wrap Berkeley up, either, in a “mere linearity”. (13)
His flamboyance, his will to ever-greater abstraction (as in the
proto-DNA pianos), and his undeniable perversity on all matters of
the socio-erotic (there is plenty his musical marionettes ‘can’t
say’, ever), raised him to another level of cultural and artistic
achievement altogether. There is some kick to Berkeley, some thrill
or daring, a surreal spirit of invention, that outruns and outplays
whatever ideology (even the mighty modernist triumvirate of sex,
technology and show business) we might think to pin on him. 2. With, of course, the always sadly deflating return to earthbound gravity and a circumscribed stage just in time for the in-film audience to applaud and the plot to kick back in at song’s end – unless, of course, the number concludes the entire film (as in The Gang’s All Here [1943], another feature directed solely by Berkeley), whereby the sequence may as well end up in outer space, and remain suspended there. In 1966, a Berkeley retrospective swept up cinephile Paris. Both Positif and Cahiers du cinéma devoted close, extensive, celebratory attention to it. While Robert Benayoun in Positif milked the connection with widespread, ‘involuntary’ Surrealism (comics, cartoons, musical fantasies in general, all Surrealism’s ‘popular accomplices’), Comolli in Cahiers took a more astringent route to certify the director’s avant-garde qualifications: the chief comparison here was to the writings of Raymond Roussel, spinner of bizarre fantasies that arose from the most systematic, baroque, cryptic rules and literary procedures. Between these two artists, Berkeley and Roussel, Comolli proposed what he called a “strange connection”. Berkeley did not only show delirious, dream images, according to this argument; more constructively and politically, he demonstrates, in the ceaseless lining-up and regrouping of his fabulous figurines, how images are born and take form, allowing their constitution element by element, until the image is complete and complex – then, he takes the image apart just at the moment when anyone else would be tempted to freeze it, decomposing it an element at a time, until it is returned to its original forms. (15) Many major Jacobs works, from Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) to the most recent, follow exactly this route: to show an image, then to decompose, complicate, multiply, overlay it; and finally, to return us to its intact, ‘archaeological’ state, complete with any edging, caption or credits it may have. In Return to the Scene of the Crime, for instance, Jacobs’ decomposition of his initial image-bank goes as far as introducing, graphically, rifts and ravines in the pictured landscape. How far can we take such a linkage of Hollywood and avant-garde? Almost everything involved in the act of filmmaking – material resources used, politics of production, networks of exhibition and distribution, cultures of reception – is utterly different from one to the other. And yet, the dogged separation of these spheres, often encouraged and preached by players on both sides, has always resulted in an impoverished vision of the cinema’s possibilities, and of what has been called its true, yet-to-be-written history of forms. As a cinephile, Jacobs has high standards – I have heard him publicly dispense disdain for everything from Eisenstein to Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) via Philippe Garrel, each time for the way a certain political mind-set fatally curdles what is interesting or innovative on the levels of content or form – but his love of what film can do fully embraces select wonders of silent cinema, slapstick comedy, musicals or fantasies … (And let’s not forget that Andrew Sarris once described Berkeley, in an influential formulation of the 1960s, as the “Méliès of the Musical” (16) – or that a typical Berkeley girl-formation once adorned the cover of a Film Culture issue in 1963.) In the liner notes to the New York Ghetto Fishmarket DVD, for instance, speaking of the cultural context of the 1950s, Jacobs advises: “You kids can’t know how exceptional The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T [1953] and Sweet Smell of Success [1957] are.” This sort of taste, on the part of major avant-garde artists, has a long and elaborate history, some it well-documented: Jack Smith’s adoration of Sternberg and Maria Montez, Joseph Cornell and Cobra Woman (1944); Martin Arnold’s reworking of a Judy Garland number from an Andy Hardy movie in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998); Australian Michael Lee’s intercutting of Buster Keaton (whom Jacobs also tapped in Keaton’s Cop [1991]) into his The Mystical Rose (1976) … What is there to stop us pursuing the comparison of Jacobs and Berkeley? Is it a distaste for the big-budget Hollywood machine that lavishly supported the latter, but would never support the former? Could it be a lingering commitment to the notion that the ideology of elaborate, mass, blockbuster image-spectacles – and hence, logically, of musicals – is just all too powerful, all too pervasive, to be fruitfully put in contact the work of an avant-gardist who is completely marginal and entirely resistant in relation to the commercial system of media? It would surely be a bad day if we decided, on principle, to wipe off all big-budget cinema (from Griffith and Eisenstein to Coppola via Berkeley); for, as we all know, the positive extravaganza-effect of certain great works of film radiates far beyond the bottom-line of dollars wrangled for and spent on them. There are even more sinister intimations lurking that we must struggle to dispel or push aside. In a brilliant text on Berkeley written in the mid ‘80s by William Routt and Richard Thompson, a passing insinuation by Thomas Elsaesser – to the effect that Hollywood musicals were liked by Hitler and had much in common with ‘Nazi revues’, and hence are irrevocably tainted with the ‘ideology of spectacle’ that we also associate, historically, with the public rallies of the Third Reich – is put under the discursive microscope. (17) Their critique became timely again in light of not only the Olympics spectaculars mentioned above, but also an item on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show in July 2009. North Korea announced today it will stage its mass rhythmic flip card animation extravaganza knows as the Arirang Games this summer. This state-sponsored nationalistic uber-circus will last from August 10th through late September […] The government of this cash-starved dictatorial regime can’t manage to feed its own people but it can train them, especially its children, to turn over 100,000 pieces of paper in exact unison. If Cirque du Soleil has always lacked that certain creepy Stalinist nationalism you crave, this might be for you. (18) The Berkeley musical (argued Routt and Thompson) is not your usual classical narrative, not a voyeuristic spectacle; rather, they it is exhibitionist, hence constructing a voyant, “one who is changed by what she has seen … one whose position is not fixed” (19) – echoing Comolli’s emphasis on the logic of metamorphosis constantly enacted in Berkeley’s numbers (as in Roussel’s prose). (20) And, as such, for Routt and Thompson, to call it ‘fascist’ or ‘Nazi’ is not historically accurate, although clearly something of those ideologies must be present in it (as well as something of communism, socialism and capitalism). The name we suggest for the ideology of spectacle is ‘populism’. (21) Populist
is not meant here in the sense of box-office-determined popularity
(although many Berkeley films achieved that, too); rather it is
offered as the name for a particular type of cinema – one that is
all spectacle or surface (in the deepest sense), eschewing the need
for hermeneutic interpretation (which is the mark of much high
culture). Let us, especially, note the following splendid idea and
vow to apply it to the work of Jacobs: that something of
fascist-capitalism, and simultaneously also something of progressive,
revolutionary, emancipatory social forms, is necessarily ‘present
in’, bound up with, the mass spectacle form. History, in all its
messiness and contingency, would have it no other way. But isn’t
Jacobs’ whole art devoted to the splitting of that atom, the
separation and rechannelling of those diverse, warring elements and
tendencies which he finds embedded in any random, charged spectacle
like a silent comedy, a newsreel, an educational propaganda film, or
a stereograph? 3. What is the appeal of the damned to artists and thinkers? Kracauer said of his friend Walter Benjamin that, for him, “knowledge arises out of ruins”, and that he was someone who “hardly ever tackles constructs and phenomena when they are in their prime, preferring instead to seek them out once they have entered the realm of the past”, because alive they “seem jumbled like a dream”, whereas “once they are in a state of disintegration they become clearer”. (22) Although Jacobs’ work is always addressed to the contemporary moment – often damningly, ferociously so – Kracauer’s description of Benjamin’s working method could also cover a large part of the Jacobs œuvre: he “gathers his harvest from works and states of affairs that have died off, that are removed from the contemporary context”. (23) And precisely, in the cases of both Benjamin and Jacobs, because this strong, almost unwavering gesture of retrospect, the shock or the strangeness of using such outmoded material, allows a special insight into the present and the archaeology of its miserable conditions. As for the appeal of the excessive, let us merely flag that it, too, concerns a certain sort of waste, or rather wastage – what Peter Wollen once called the “wasteful luxury of utopian projects”, a profligate expenditure, a spending without accounting. (24) There is a curious paradox in Jacobs’ marriage of the maudit and the flamboyant that begs to be unpacked: how can a cinema made from nothing – from almost nothing, at any rate, or near enough to zero to count as nothing in the eyes of Hollywood – also be so abundant, so fantastically, luxuriantly wasteful in the best possible way? Jacobs’ work always offers its spectator an embarrassment of riches, shaming the limited powers of mere verbal description. So many recent works since his enthusiastic taking up of digital tools, from the very short to the very long; so many games, demonstrations, avenues of exploration, multiple angles of attack upon his material. Like a circus barker, Jacobs the avant-garde showman keeps prodding us with chapter headings, words superimposed onto or inserted into images, old-fashioned intertitles. Minimalist is assuredly not the first word that springs to mind when we try to come to terms with Jacobs. And yet minimal his material resources most certainly are. Both waste and luxury point to economic conditions: precarity, or wealth. Jacobs’ cinema has frequently addressed both topics, often in their extremes, from the everyday workers’ market to corporate big business. Much avant-garde cinema finds itself close – sometimes far too close for comfort – to the physical, material conditions of precarity; however, popular film – and specifically populist film, movies that attempt to speak up for the rights and ethos of the common man and woman – has frequently adopted the topic as thematic terrain. In musicals – especially but far from exclusively those of Berkeley – this thematic of precarity and wealth gets intricately bound up with formal experiments and procedures, with the nature of the spectacle itself. Here, Berkeley nudges close to what Jacobs will truly liberate in the cinematic medium: an aesthetic economy which is at once as precarious and as wild as the economic fluctuations and iniquities of the social world which the latter’s films so caustically, savagely address. Musicals have long been linked to the analysis of money – through drama and comedy, and also inevitably in a mirroring self-reference. According to Routt and Thompson – who place the suggestively economic word surplus in the very title of their piece – Berkeley’s numbers in Roman Scandals (and we could extend the point to many other films he worked on) are “all vehicles for economic commentary”, especially “the relations of economics to sex”. (25) Mark Roth’s opinion covers vaster generic ground: “The economic problem common to most musicals is distribution of money”. (26) Hoberman follows the thick weave of references in 42nd Street to “employment opportunities” and “economic agreements”. (27) Most dazzlingly within the history of film commentary, Richard Dyer once zeroed in on tensions linked to wealth (and its absence) in his wide-ranging, programmatic sketch of the musical genre, “Entertainment and Utopia”. (28) Dyer aimed to take much further the insight buried within the mainstream line on the musical as ‘escapist’ entertainment, as exemplified by John Gillett’s workmanlike summary of Berkeley and the value of his work. In the Depression years, these lavish, opulent numbers sung by plaintive tenors surround by a stream of beautiful girls, must have seemed the fulfilment of a much-needed dream world; seen today their extravagance can still produce gasps of wonder from audiences now more aware of the surrealist, erotic thinking which often inspired them and the technical skills which created them. (29) Dyer was the first, in the early ‘70s, to really ask: just what is the substance, the action of this dream-fulfilment? Is it so easy to separate the ideological function (for the masses) from the surrealist-erotic thrills and technical appreciation (for the specialised connoisseurs) – as two tiers that split over time, especially once the Camp sensibility of the ‘60s focused an ironic reading of texts like Berkeley’s? Dyer suggests that “the categories of the utopian sensibility are related to specific inadequacies in society”: therefore, the musical answers real scarcity with imaginary abundance, exhaustion with energy, dreariness with intensity, manipulation with transparency, and fragmentation with community. (30) The advantage of this analysis is that it does offer some explanation of why entertainment works. It is not just leftovers from history, it is not just what show business, or ‘they’, force on the rest of us, it is not simply the expression of external needs – it responds to real needs created by society. (31) Another advantage of Dyer’s model is that it stresses non-representational elements (such as rhythm and colour) as much as representational elements. The non-representational realm, as the realm of the affective and sensational, is precisely where the utopian thrust lies: musicals stage a contradiction between the “heavily representational and verisimilitudinous (pointing to the way the world is, drawing on the audience’s concrete experience of the world) and the heavily non-representational and ‘unreal’ (pointing to how things could be better.” (32) And therein lies the fundamental political ambiguity of musical spectacle, and its capacity to be mobilised in any number of contrary directions – since “to draw attention to the gap between what is and what could be, is, ideologically speaking, playing with fire.” (33) Actually, it is within the context Dyer sketches that the camp musical – as a textual, and particularly avant-garde form, rather than as a cult phenomenon – begins to open up. From Jack Smith, early Almodóvar and early John Waters to Jon Moritsugu via the Kuchars and Tsai Ming-liang (The Hole, 1998), experimental queer cinema has often confronted its own economic precarity with an ironic abundance of singing, dancing, fabrics, flowers, an orgy of colourful stimuli, a sensory overload: this is its resistance, and its utopian imagination. (34) And Jacobs’ work, so closely associated with that of Smith – in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and the recent retrospections of Star Spangled to Death (2004), an “epic film shot for hundreds of dollars” as Jacobs calls it, and Two Wrenching Departures (2006) – explores, to an largely unprecedented degree, an aesthetic economy of abundance; it is the outpouring, the surplus of formal display which itself registers as utopian – and not so much in a wishful as in a materialist register. Hoberman divined in Berkeley’s sequences for 42nd Street a “nexus of glamorous display, fantastic abundance, and utopian social order”; (35) Jacobs pulls even that nexus apart. For a utopian social order – unless it be the fragile, precarious community created around Smith, or inside Jacobs’ own family circle – is a myth constantly under attack in his work. Superfluous objects (in Kracauer’s droll statement quoted at the head of this essay) would be more necessary if they were less abundant. Mass production (whether of consumer goods or Tiller Girls) cheapens; obsessive, assembly-line seriality robs things of their aura. Yet this was not a simple, grouchy, nostalgic complaint (about the death of individuality or originality) coming from Kracauer; more a two-sided worry, or musing – of a kind that also informs Jacobs’ work. For Kracauer held onto the intuition, throughout his entire life, that the most bizarre forms of commodity-spectacle could, by virtue of their very excess, reveal something of the social order that gave rise to them – provide an X-ray of a hidden pattern so dramatically, so decisively, that the most ordinary, unreflective citizen would suddenly see it within the formulaic entertainment served up to them. At least, this was his dream – a dream, it appeared, forever just out of reach of the history through which he lived, but a vibrant potentiality nonetheless. “The aesthetic pleasure gained from ornamental mass movements is legitimate”, he pleaded to those disbelievers among the “educated people” he addressed in journalistic print. When significant components of reality become invisible in our world, art must make do with what is left, for an aesthetic presentation is all the more real the less it dispenses with the reality outside the aesthetic sphere. (36) Raymond
Durgnat proposed something roughly
similar in 1973 when he defended the category of Hollywood
entertainments (specifically, Vincente Minnelli’s melancholic musical Bells
are Ringing [1960]) that, while
“accepting all that is true in the conformist myth”, nonetheless
manages to “reveal at least the outlines of those parts of reality
against which the myth is braced”. (37) To reveal the reality
against which a myth is braced – meanwhile rejecting all that is true in the conformist myth – is the project of many of
Jacobs’ works. 4. Capitalism: Child Labor offers a remarkable example of Jacobs’ method. The video digitises the twin images of a stereograph showing – serenely, naively, innocently, matter-of-factly – the appalling labour conditions in a packed turn-of-the-20th-century factory. As is rarely the case in Jacobs’s work, he uses a continuous music track: a relentlessly humming, mechanically rhythmic, synthesised piece composed by Rick Reed, which clanks into a sudden shut-off over the end credits. As in many Jacobs videos of the 21st century, Child Labor explores the three-dimensionality of its indexical trace: the elaborate ceiling fixtures, stretching back deep into the distance, seem to swell and pop out; magnified details show hands in frozen gestures floating eerily away from their surroundings. Jacobs makes extensive use of black-frame punctuation (hence the prior warning for those viewers suffering from epilepsy) to help create the 3D illusion in our eyes and minds. And – although this association may be the furthest thing from the filmmaker’s intention – it is hard for a viewer with even a passing familiarity with contemporary practices of slickly professional film, television and computer games not to see the 3D work here as an elaborate subversion of its current, dominant usage. In place of the smooth, ‘deep space’, modelling movements around static objects in popular animation, or the strenuous efforts to ‘bring alive’ still photos in documentary by separating and setting in motion their various pictorial planes (see, for an overblown example, the inside-Hollywood reconstruction The Kid Stays in the Picture [2002]), Child Labor gives us a vivid motion-sensation that is at once fascinating and deliberately maddening, a paradox in action. The digital morphing from one frame to the other (just a moment apart in real time), looped over and over – but now streaming to the right, now to the left – tricks us into seeing, for a suspended, hallucinatory moment, on each ‘pass’ through, a circular, tracking motion which is about to go all the way around its object. But it never does. The constant, alternate shuffling from left to right, likewise, both heightens the illusion of real space unfolding in a temporal move of the camera-apparatus, and frustrates it – by always bringing us back, with a jolt, to the original staticness of the images. The visual information provided in these stereograph images is both impoverished – it truly is the record of a stolen moment – and surprisingly, hauntingly rich. Jacobs, as he has always done, selects for our attention what our viewing habits may have led us to miss on first or even second glance: small, off-centre details that provide the X-ray picture of an entire society, like a glum, young face at work, an arm raised to a lever, a leg or foot jutting out from the assembly line … Constantly we return to the inscrutable, sallow face of a particular youngster posed near the front of this mise en scène: he could almost be the prisoner of a concentration camp. The new image of this anonymous boy that Jacobs creates from the old, panoramic view of the shop-floor recalls another of Agamben’s formulations, this time about gesture in its smallest, human sense, and its relation to the medium of photography: “A good photographer knows how to grasp the eschatological nature of the gesture – without, however, taking anything away from the historicity or singularity of the event.” (39) In
this case, Jacobs intervenes as the ‘good videographer’ who
grasps within the primary image its grand, eschatological, damning
metaphor – while also redeeming (in Kracauer’s sense of noticing,
hailing, raising up, making a meaningful pattern from what was
always, or at one particular moment, there to see in the world)
something or someone that was once real, and has long passed into the
oblivion of the socio-historical dustbin. 5. The specific mechanism of Berkeley’s reification consists in the dismemberment of the Show Girls, the patent artificiality of their make-up and hair, the simple, repetitive choreography, the stress on the similarity of appearance, and, most of all, in the application of a rigid, metronomic system of montage, derived from Soviet, German and French models. (41) Particularly intriguing, in this scattered history of points of comparison, is the testament of Durgnat from a 1981 text on his practice as a teacher of film, replete with allusions to Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s notions of social shock and speed. Around 1965 we started running sequences like John Barrymore’s long-distance hypnosis of Trilby in Archie Mayo’s Svengali [1931], or the ditch-digging sequence in King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread [1934], and, above all, the Busby Berkeley production numbers in 42nd Street [1933] and Dames [1934]. We realised they were visual montages constructed on surprisingly Eisenstein-like principles, even when they used camera movements and in-shot action as the muscle of their ‘shocks’. The Vidor sequence was much like a musical – it was Busby Berkeley with dust and sweat. As for B.B. – he was abstracting and rearranging social processes even more drastically than Dziga Vertov was. He was the bourgeois answer to Bolshevism, a Broadway cubo-futurist-constructivist, asking parallel questions about how to organise, and live through, a high-speed mass society. (42) A Broadway cubo-futurist-constructivist: with a little stretching, this linguistic invention could serve to capture several aspects of Ken Jacobs, too. I (like Durgnat) am using constructivism in a broad sense here, not tied solely to the historic Russian example. Nonetheless, many aesthetic and cultural aspects of the original, national movement—if not its specific Bolshevik ideology—remain pertinent to the contemporary art that has followed in its wake. According to the authoritative account offered by Vlada Petric, Russian constructivism, across film, theatre, architecture and photomontage, aimed to be a ‘useful object,’ something that could embody and ‘engineer’ a particular social consciousness in the citizens who experienced it on a daily basis. Petric quotes a 1922 manifesto by Naum Gabo and Antonin Pevsner: “Art is the realisation of our spatial perception of the world.” Constructivist art (in all its forms and media) would be, all at once, transparent (its mechanics completely on display), unified in what Vertov referred to as a “rhythmic and aesthetic whole,” and heterogeneous, as per Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theory that a theatrical presentation should not be an “inviolable entity” but something rigorously assembled from many separate pieces. (43) Constructivism thus offered both an ideal picture of the new social world, of how it was to be organised, as well as tips for those citizens still in transit from the old world on how to negotiate it, adapt to it, experience it. Beyond the particular time and place of the birth (and vicissitudes) of constructivism, many formalist movements within international avant-garde cinema can be related, variously, to its goals and methods: ‘mechanical’ structures made explicit; a unified form that nonetheless proclaims the heterogeneity of its assemblage; and a constant dialogue (often more critical than in ‘official’ Soviet art) with the material conditions of modernity, with its myriad shocks to the sensorium. Jacobs’ art certainly fits within the most radical current of this stream. In a true history of forms, constructivism, like fascism or capitalism, would be present in a wide diversity of cultural phenomena. It can work as umbrella term, covering the structuralist tendency in 1960s and 1970s avant-garde film culture (including, variously, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka, and Hollis Frampton), as well as all those filmmakers (from Stephen Dwoskin to Dušan Makavejev) whom Durgnat viewed as, in various ways, inventive departures from the original constructivist impulse. (44) Constructivism, in Durgnat’s terms, refers to the ‘muscularity’ of structure-building in cinema – not rigid or schematic structures, but unfolding, modulating, mutating ones. This
constructivist thrust is what makes the difference between Jacobs and
his friend
and collaborator, Jack Smith. Where Smith was
all wasteful luxury amid severe precarity, Jacobs has brought to this
paradoxical pairing of tendencies the muscular structures that
compose and decompose, form and deform, in reel-time. And Jacobs,
too, hopes (without illusion) for a little social engineering of
spectators, some smashing and rebuilding of collective consciousness,
in his dream of a ‘delusion-free people’: “The recognised
illusion is the death of the social delusion … I lovingly expose
the image as I show it as such.” (45) 6. I had to wonder, at the end of Berlant’s otherwise superb presentation: is this really what we should choose to call a ‘new cinema of precarity’ (French or otherwise)? These comfortable, well-treated feature films, now on the shelves of every DVD store or streaming venue with due aspirations to culture? (48) Surely the avant-garde – with, as is usually the case, its brutal Poverty Row conditions alongside the most miraculous no-budget ingenuity – deserves a Guernsey here, if anywhere? And surely, if there is to be something labelled a new cinema of precarity (not so new, after all) – superimposing the general associations of what Berlant called ‘the precarious present’ upon strict economic precarity – Ken Jacobs would be its shining star? Because he affirms, in the magnificent gesture of his audiovisual art, both
precarity and its carnivalesque opposite, an outrageous, anarchistic
super-abundance; both the immediate sensory gratification of populist
spectacle and a pedagogy of its critique, step by step, frame by
frame; both the surplus of the economic-aesthetic system and its
subversion. Both the X-ray of the sad world as it is, and its joyous
metamorphosis. Ken Jacobs is the Busby Berkeley we need today. This
essay first appeared in the book Optic
Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford
University Press, 2011) edited by Michele
Pierson, David E. James & Paul Arthur.
I thank those editors for instigating this work; I thank Ken &
Flo for their assistance, encouragement and reactions. NOTES 2. Pierre Reverdy (trans. A. Martin), “The Image”, Sabzian (19 September 2018), https://www.sabzian.be/text/the-image. back 3. See Robert Benayoun, “Berkeley le centupieur”, Positif, no. 74 (March 1966), pp. 29-41; Alain Masson, “Le Style de Busby Berkeley”, Positif, no. 173 (September 1975), pp. 41-48. See also Masson, Comédie musicale (Ramsay, 1999); and Martin Rubin, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle (Columbia University Press, 1993). back 4. See Arthur Cantrill, “‘The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid’,” Senses of Cinema, no. 19 (March-April 2002), https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/feature-articles/lye-2/. back 5. Lucy Fischer, “The Image of Woman as Image: The Optical Politics of Dames”, in Rick Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 72. This essay was reprinted within the context of a wider discussion of the musical genre in her Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women’s Cinema (BFI/Macmillan, 1989), pp. 134-148. back 6. Jean-Louis Comolli, “La danse des images. Kaleidoscopie de Busby Berkeley”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 174 (January 1966), p. 24. English translation: “Dancing Images”, Cahiers du cinéma in English, no. 2 (1966), pp. 22-26. back 7. For instance, some episodes of the Godard/Anne-Marie Miéville television series France/tour/detour/deux/enfants (1978) – in which the speech and gestures of children are ‘broken down’ via video techniques – are labeled Chemistry, Physics, Geometry, Geography and Calculus … as well as Economy. back 8. Cy Caldwell, quoted in Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical, p. 46. back 9. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 77. back 10. Ibid, p. 76. back 11. I owe a debt to Helen Grace and her “Indissoluble Girl Clusters: Kracauer in China”, an unpublished paper presented at a 2008 Monash University conference on Kracauer. back 12. J. Hoberman, 42nd Street (British Film Institute, 1993), p. 13. back 13. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 77. back 14. See the email writings of Jacobs about 3D documented in Optic Antics, pp. 167-170. back 15. Comolli, “La danse des images”, p. 24 (my translation). back 16. Quoted in Hoberman, 42nd Street, p. 74. back 17. William D. Routt and Richard Thompson, “‘Keep Young and Beautiful’: Surplus and Subversion in Roman Scandals”, in Tom O’Regan and Brian Shoesmith (eds.), History On/And/In Film (Perth: History and Film Association of Australia, 1987), pp. 31-44; a later, revised version of this essay appeared under the same title in Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 42 No. 1 (Spring 1990), pp. 17-35. I will continue citing the earlier, better version here. The Elsaesser essay they discuss is “Film History and Visual Pleasure: Weimar Cinema”, in Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (eds.), Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices (American Film Institute, 1984), pp. 47-84. back 18. Transcribed at https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna31848702. back 19. Routt & Thompson, “Surplus and Subversion”, p. 34. back 20. Comolli, “La danse”, p. 24. back 21. Routt & Thompson, “Surplus and Subversion”, pp. 34-35. back 22. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, pp. 261-262. For further discussion of the resonance between Jacobs and Kracauer, see my 2008 review of Star Spangled to Death. back 23. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 262. back 24. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (Verso, 1993), p. 151. back 25. Routt & Thompson, “Surplus and Subversion”, p. 36. back 26. Mark Roth, “Some Warners Musicals and the Spirit of the New Deal”, in Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical, p. 53. back 27. Hoberman, 42nd Street, p. 20. back 28. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia”, in Genre: The Musical, pp. 175-189. back 29. John Gillett, “Busby Berkeley and American Musicals of the 30s”, in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema: A Critical Dictionary – Volume One (Secker and Warburg, 1980), pp. 122-125. back 30. Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia”, pp. 183-184. back 31. Ibid, p. 184. back 32. Ibid, p. 185. back 33. Ibid. back 34. For more on this connection, see my “Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond and Against Hollywood”, the most comprehensive version of which is available as a Level 2 Reward on my Patreon site www.patreon.com/adrianmartin. back 35. Hoberman, 42nd Street, p. 10. back 36. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 79. back 37. Raymond Durgnat, “Film Favorites: Bells Are Ringing”, in Gregg Rickman (ed.), The Film Comedy Reader (Limelight, 2001), p. 236. back 38. Giorgio Agamben (ed. & trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 77. back 39. Agamben (trans. Jeff Fort), Profanations (Zone Books, 2007), p. 25. back 40. Fischer, “The Image of Woman”, in Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical, p. 73. back 41. Routt & Thompson, “Surplus and Subversion”, p. 44. back 42. Raymond Durgnat, “Towards Practical Criticism”, AFI Education Newsletter, Vol. 4 No. 4 (March-April 1981), p. 10. back 43. Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera – A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 5, 7. back 44. See Durgnat (1982), “A Skeleton Key to Stephen Dwoskin: Outline for a Text Not Written”, reprinted in Henry Miller (ed.), The Essential Raymond Durgnat (BFI, 2014), pp. 197-201; and WR – Mysteries of the Organism (BFI, 1999). back 45. Optic Antics, p. 169. back 46. Lauren Berlant, “After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present”, University of Melbourne, 13 August 2008. This material was subsequently reworked for a chapter of her book Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011). back 47. Nicole Brenez, “Plasticity and Precarity: Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movie”, Rouge, no. 13 (2009), http://rouge.com.au/13/timeless.html. back 48. Berlant’s work was merely the beginning of a sadly persistent trend in 21st century academia: the addressing of precarity solely in relatively mainstream arthouse and festival-fare examples, and (worse still) almost entirely at the level of depicted, represented content, often literally stuck at plot summary (also known under the misnomer of a ‘cultural studies’ approach to film); Áine O’Healy’s work on Italian cinema (such as Migrant Anxieties [Indiana University Press, 2019]) is only one glaring example of this tendency. back
© Adrian Martin July 2009 (revised January 2010 & updated October 2025) |
