Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1971) by Ken Jacobs
Saturday, December 1, 1984, 8:00 pm
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1971) by Ken Jacobs, 115 min., B&W and color, silent.
Ken Jacobs based this film on a 1905 American Mutoscope and Biograph Company film, probably photographed by G.W. Bitzer. The film was an illustration of the children’s nursery rhyme of the same title and was one of the first chase films. By subjecting the original material to various forms of rephotography (focusing on details, introducing camera movement within the frame, interjecting shadow-play and color sequences), Jacobs deals with the nature of the film viewing experience representation, narrative, illusion, and abstraction. “Ghosts! Cine recordings of the vivacious doings of persons long dead… My camera closes in, only to better ascertain the infinite richness (playing with fate, taking advantage of the loop-character of all movies, recalling with variations some visual complexes again and again for particular savoring), searching out incongruities in the story-telling delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of story-telling itself and this within the fantasy of reading any bygone time out of the visual crudities of film: dream within a dream!” — Ken Jacobs