Shapes Through Time and Space: An Interview with Ken Jacobs About His Abstract 3D Film 3X3D

3D is used to record visual reality, but that’s where I take off to the unimaginable. We are (wonderfully) constrained by our particular physiognomy and I wouldn’t change a thing, but the tools of cinema allow the seeing of undreamable sights. Why not explore these tools/toys in grown-up play?

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With an artistic background based on abstract expressionism, American experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs is an inevitable reference in the research of experimental film in 3D. In 2015, the New York City-based director released 3X3D, a Blu-ray-only poetic/political feature-length documentary in which he explored the limits of 3D aesthetics. While he was shooting the film, he would also record what he had witnessed of the Occupy Wall Street movement two years earlier. Jacobs divided the film into three distinct segments. Much of what he created is free from realistic images and narrative structure, especially the second segment, “A Primer in Sky Socialism.” But it is in the first segment, “Blankets for Indians,” shot during the 2013 long-term demonstration, that Jacobs produces a complex sequence of image superimpositions, a clear example of spatial montage, a term coined by Lev Manovich (2001)1 referring to editing different images into a single film frame.

This quality, so unusual in 3D cinema, is also present in a French Portuguese co-production also called 3X3D (2013) (the only difference in the name being the capital X in Jacobs’s film), which is also divided into three parts. While Jacobs directed his feature film alone, the 2013 European production had each of its segments directed by a different filmmaker: Peter Greenaway (“Just in Time”), Edgar Pêra (“Cinesapiens”), and Jean-Luc Godard (“Les trois désastres”). Shown at film festivals like Cannes and in selected theaters, 3X3D generated interest among critics in the possibilities of 3D as a tool for imagery experimentalism.

Jacobs further divided each of the segments into smaller but close, cohesive, and complementary parts. This interview is focused on imagery constructions, seeking visual and conceptual particularities, considering the two films and their similar proposals. One feature that clearly distinguishes the two films is that much of Jacobs’s film lacks stereoscopy, at least not noticeable when viewed without glasses. This is the case of the first segment, “Blankets for Indians,” which shows images of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Over the images, Jacobs superimposes captions with political commentary.

There are moments of screen splitting with juxtaposed images. Some excerpts rely on documentary images treated with vivid colors in different transparency levels, making them almost seem to be just contours in a kaleidoscopic changing composition. They resemble the scenes in which Pêra fuses shots and reverse shots in different scenes or superimposes images in negative effect, as well as when Greenaway applies transparency to the architecture and furniture of a cathedral in 3X3D.

In the second segment, “A Primer in Sky Socialism,” Jacobs alters the (nocturnal) images with the effect of prolonged exposure and insertion of colors. It is the least realistic segment in the images, all geared toward visual experimentation with the concept of paracinema, coined by Jacobs in the 1960s to escape the standardized protocols of commercial cinema. Stereoscopy does little or nothing to change the expressiveness of the out-of-focus images, usually noticeable in the figure of the people in them, sometimes with a ghostly aspect. Definition is lost, as well as the tridimensional effect in sections shown in 2D. Some of Pêra’s images received a lot of post-production treatment and are close to those of this segment, although lacking the blur of prolonged exposure – but with a clear three-dimensionality.

The stereoscopic effect is not decisive in the third segment, “The Guests,” either. It shows a one-minute film from the early days of cinema, which was digitized and is repeated over 70 minutes so that the viewers look for details they hadn’t noticed in the image before. The approach is similar to the film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), also directed by Jacobs. Instead of the same scene filmed from two almost identical angles to forge stereoscopy, the filmmaker joined images of two almost equal moments, with their frames slightly apart, positioned to the sides, not to the front nor the back of one another.

The entrance of people into a church for the wedding of the Lumière brothers’ projectionist, Charles Moisson, in 1896 presents a traditional figurative imagery construction. It is a conceptual work that constantly stimulates examination of the viewer’s gaze through its repetition. The guest is a filmic fragment, a resource that Godard also uses at times in 3X3D. With glasses you can clearly see the 3D effect, but the filmed elements within the image look like paper cutouts. At the end of this segment, the very low speed of the images seems to increase to that of a traditional slow-motion pace.

Early in his career, Jacobs was particularly drawn to the abstract expressionism of Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Hofmann offered the filmmaker a scholarship at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, where Jacobs found the context and the confidence to visually explore his ideas about space, in painting and film. “The biggest challenge for Hofmann as an artist was to transform space into movement, like the penetration of one moment into the next: in a word, in time” (Pierson, 2011, p. 5).2 Jacobs began producing his 3D shadow theaters in 1969, when his wife Florence (Flo) was already involved in his work.

Among Jacobs’s projects, some of which he carried on over the years, The Nervous System was a type of live projection used in some performances by the artist between 1975 and 2000. The filmmaker called the effect he achieved 2 1/2-D. These presentations used two identical rolls of film in two 16mm or 35mm analytical projectors, capable of advancing one frame at a time and freezing images. With an external, rotating propeller-type shutter between the two projectors, it switched quickly between the two frames, blending the images despite gaps with no photography. The Nervous System explored the spatial and temporal differences between two nearly identical film frames, just one frame apart from each other in the film sequence. The goal was “to pull a tense plastic play of volume configurations and movements out of standard (2-D) pictorial patterning” (Pierson, 2011, p. 17), which is projected between the screen and the viewer.

In 1990, Jacobs presented the Nervous Magic Lantern projections, whose precursor was Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia, seen in New York in 1922. Both the Lumia and Nervous Magic Lantern projects relied on an ingenious apparatus to create abstract 3D imagery compositions to stimulate viewers to access their own imagination, which made them popular (Pierson, 2011, p. 18). Two Wrenching Departures, from 1989, mixed Jacobs’s typical Nervous System performance with a theatrical performance. The cinematic part featured shaky three-dimensional images. In addition, its temporal experiences allow this material to offer a greater chance of contemplation and scrutiny of the images shown. “Both the three-dimensional transformation of space and the distension of time multiply the implications, the personal and cultural associations and, not least, the emotional reverberations,” comments Tony Pipolo (2011, p. 117).3

Since 1999, the filmmaker has produced very quick animations (less than a second), repeated in constant looping with a depth effect better perceived when seen with only one eye, his 3D eternalisms. In the 2000s, Jacobs began exploring more traditional 3D effect techniques, such as anaglyphs. That was before the efforts of other renowned directors who experimented with digital 3D in feature-length films beyond Hollywood, such as Godard, Greenaway, as well as Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. The artist ends up providing with his experiments an experience comparable to that of stereoscopic photography in the mid-19th century. 3X3D crowns Jacob’s experience with digital 3D imagery.

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In my PhD thesis I explored spatial montage of superimposed images. When I had a chance to watch the French Portuguese co-production 3X3D (2013) in early 2014, I found the most astonishing example of what I intended to examine, considering only films that had been commercially released. Later on I found your Blu-ray-only film with the same title for sale online. The additional artistic perspective of your proposal would be perfect for comparison, since I’d like to analyze the contribution of stereoscopic images to that kind of montage. Had you watched 3x3D, the 2013 production directed by Peter Greenaway, Edgar Pêra, and Jean-Luc Godard, before you released your own 3X3D? If you had, what were your impressions, and how do you think the two films compare?

I am happy to answer your questions as best as I can. I hope I have the answers; much of what I do is entirely derived from practical experience without much theory or depth understanding of how things work. Sorry, I am first learning about their 3X3D from your question. I saw the Godard (whom I very much respect) 3D film and found it disappointing. I thought he had no feeling for depth, none.

Why Blu-ray? Wasn’t there an interest in having the film in theaters, even during festivals? The Occupy Wall Street movement was pretty vivid in people’s memories back then. Or was it never the intention to begin with?

I have never even thought of theatrical release.

You directed your feature film by yourself and, as with the 2013 production, divided it into three segments that justified the film’s name. In the European 3x3D, however, a different filmmaker directed each segment. In both cases, the results of this division were quite different. How was the conceptual part of each segment organized before shooting, if that was the case, or how did you came up with the ideas for each one of them?

They are indeed three separate works. I don’t plan or write scripts. Something grabs me and I go at it.

Please tell me a little bit about your contact with three-dimensional techniques in image creation throughout your career and how you gradually adapted and developed them in your work in film.

I grew up thinking 3D movies were stupid, exploitative. Best to avoid. Early stereographs often had real feeling for depth, and I collected many. Disregarded, they were absurdly cheap, rarely more than a dime apiece. Study of painting under Hans Hofmann made me conscious of depth and the challenge of indicating depth on a flat plane. Photography then made the illusion of 3D possible, and that was bad but enticing. I eventually understood that illusion was also pliable, in Hofmann’s word “plastic,” and again I consider myself a painter. Have you discovered Vimeokenjacobs?4 Lots to see. In my mid-20s, I shot and gathered “found footage” for Star Spangled to Death, about seven hours of disgust with USA history; very entertaining! Recently put the film on the site, making it available for viewing at no cost.

Your eternalisms are one of your most recognizable trademarks. Are they only about a fast and constant substitution between the image and its negative form, or is there a slight movement in the image too, whether made by the camera or montage?

Yes, they are always two or more phases of movement; in many eternalisms the twin pictures –not identical twins – are from a stereo camera, the discontinued Fuji W3 (best model). Those derived from my 2D Ipad drawings are assembled by our daughter Nisi (Nissan); only she knows how.

I am going to tell you how the eternalism came about. With no thought of the phenomenon, Flo and I began working at ideas I had about projection. I set up two 16mm projectors side by side that were capable of single-frame projection, still, retreat, and advance. Working side by side, we examined small differences between shots. A flat disk on a separate motor between the projectors alternated the two images, drawing strange phenomena from them. At first, I tried to minimize the black interval between the projections and tried many differently shaped cutouts of the disk, but then noticed dimensional occurrences with disks that had greater moments of darkness between the projections. I’d also been investigating 3D projection for some time, but this was unexpected.

I invited Alfons Schilling over to see it. Living close by we’d become friends over shared interest in 3D and often checked in on each other. Alfons liked what he saw. “Try giving it more black,” he said. That’s all I recall him saying. I couldn’t do it at the moment; it meant cutting out another disk. Later, Alfons gone, I tried it and the full eternalism was there!

We got a letter from Alfons telling us his lawyer said we should stop working as we were and shouldn’t show it in public, that Alfons had discovered the phenomenon. The thought of patenting hadn’t once crossed my mind, but now I myself contacted a lawyer willing to work for impoverished inventors and protected myself. We never heard from Alfons again and then learned he’d returned to Germany.

“Try giving it more black” is not enough to make the phenomenon of Alfons’s discovery. Another thing I recall him saying was, “You, Ken, are an artist, but I am more of an inventor.” He surely worked hard and seriously, while I had been lucky. Could anyone have imagined such a thing, and going in search of it?

“Blankets for Indians” is predominantly composed of images from the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, regular images without any post-production effects, just at some moments they are briefly frozen. But by splitting the frame in two, in a juxtaposed mirror effect, the bubbles produced by a water fountain generated an abstract figure, which looks like a monster’s face at times. There are also scenes in which you combined different shots in superimposition, making all the elements in the shot transparent; then you inserted different colors in different parts of that kaleidoscope-like whole. That created a complex visual stereoscopic composition that clearly recalls your background in abstract expressionism. All that effect contrasts a lot with the realistic images from the streets of New York. How have you used spatial montage (juxtaposition and superimposition) in your films, and how has the stereoscopic digital image influenced the result?

I mention early in the film that I was on the way to the fountain when meeting the marchers. I return to it at the end. You want to know why I do things; my reasons are ones a cook might say and rarely ideological. I read and think but my films are primarily sensory: how do things feel? Does this engage my attention?

(An aside: I taught a course for years, The Economy of Attention.)

In the second segment, “A Primer in Sky Socialism,” did you record or treat the nocturnal images with a blurry effect of prolonged exposure? I believe there were also insertions of colors and moments of expansion of time. It is the most visually experimental segment. I suppose it is a good example of the concept of paracinema, coined by you in the 1960s to escape the standard protocols of commercial cinema. Was there any spatial montage, any superimposition of images to create that effect? Stereoscopy doesn’t change a lot of the expressiveness of those images; the depth of the elements on screen is not very clear for that, right?

Depth juxtapositions are almost always foremost. There was the undirected actuality and then my pictorial response to it, which in my work is of course sensitive to dimension. Smears of light bordering on substance make for exciting imagery. We differ as to the last thing you say (“stereoscopy doesn’t change”), and of course I believe the images are always clear; distorted as nature but clear as imagery. Monstrous, even, but it is a movie of sorts and not actuality.

The segment “The Guests” has probably the most unusual kind of 3D effect experience: temporal made spatial. How did you come up with that effect? Juxtaposing instead of superimposing. But then we can still see a blue and a red halo in the image, right? So there is some superimposing too. It would be great to understand that process better, if you could share the information. Was it something developed by you or previously by somebody else?

Thinking, envisioning, experimenting made it possible, including some important experimentation on her own by my wife Florence. She and I worked together on all the projection performances beginning in 1975, and “The Guests” was a live performance for years before becoming a somewhat standard single-strand 3D film. In performance, we very slowly projected and superimposed two prints of a non-stereo film – one frame out of synch – on projectors capable of holding each frame in their respective gates for extended periods of time. A shutter/propeller up front alternated the projections at a particular speed while their positions on-screen relative to each other could shift, making many different effects happen including a 3D that did not require glasses, the first eternalisms.

Red and blue comes from the anaglyph process, avoided in projection where polarized light allowed separation of the superimposed images one to each eye. Normally, the slight horizontal shift of location between two eyes gives us a rendition of things in depth familiar to us; why not consider two similar frames a distance apart on a strand of 2D film showing things in motion? We go to freak shows; now we see normal physiognomy made freakish by a tiny intrusion of time. “Temporal made spatial” is right.

Let’s give a moment to consider this triumph of Nature in evolving not only the light-sensitive eye but eyes that work in concert to deliver the phenomena of depth to the brain. That tiny insect that evaded your swat sees in stereo.

Do you relate your social and political views on any level with the way you produce images? I am thinking about the usual comparisons in cultural studies between the transparent approach to image making, which treats the camera as an extension of the eyes, and the kind of image that exposes the artificiality of the techniques that produced it. If so, how do you understand that?

Society is structured arbitrarily. A pattern dominates and becomes sanctified. Our rich must be kept happy at whatever cost to the rest of us. Many poor expect their turn at bullying the poor to happen promptly upon their deaths. Meanwhile, the actual rich in their pandemic retreats are making plans to abandon the planet altogether. Are you suggesting I turn this course of events around?

I love exposing and embarrassing techniques that validate normalcy. It’s fun. The old movie studios would hire “wild men” who knew little or nothing about traditional ways to make movies and who would come up with astonishing suggestions. I’m a wild man who doesn’t have to be constrained by the telling of stories. I was punished by poverty for years for following the values of contemporary painting, lucking out with a wife that shares those values and then – even without a high school diploma – was invited to teach in a university at a very special moment in history, the sixties (I’m 87).5 I’m a bastard born to a poor flapper who painted her pictures in front of me. Crazy luck.

How do you believe stereoscopic images can evolve from the mere tridimensional figurative effect to some kind of more experimental and unpredictable procedure? Are there more stereoscopic experiments coming from your studio?

Yes, including things I have no understanding of, only a wow (see Movie That Invites Pausing from 2020). The territory is barely touched upon. 3D is used to record visual reality, but that’s where I take off to the unimaginable. We are (wonderfully) constrained by our particular physiognomy and I wouldn’t change a thing, but the tools of cinema allow the seeing of undreamable sights. Why not explore these tools/toys in grown-up play?

The movies that tell stories are very constrained in how they picture the world. That’s fine; I also like stories and have even told a few (The Sky Socialist 1 and 2). But especially with electronic imagery the literally unimaginable opens for exploration. We’re given a choice: story settings or refreshed possibilities of appearance as we take control of the mechanics of vision and go beyond what nature can show us. Enough people work at story; I’m for exploring the literally unthinkable sights that technology now makes possible.

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Interview conducted in October 2020. Jacobs made additional comments regarding eternalisms in August 2024. All images are screenshots from the films discussed.