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Ken Jacobs, From Muybridge to Brooklyn Bridge
Museum of Modern Art, September 20, 1996
Unpublished

© 1996, John Matturri

Trains and films have been connected from the start. Among film's several births was Lumiere's depiction of the arrival of a train at a station and among the most remarkable steps in its trajectory from peep show to theater was an attraction, Hales Tours, which in its 14th Street incarnation gave a start to the movie career of Adolph Zukor, in which the audience watched films of passing scenes while seated in a railroad car that was made to move and shake in simulation of an actual
railroad journey. Train films, along, perhaps, with narrativeless pornography, continue to provide among the purest contemporary film forms: as advertised in train buff magazines they promise hard core experiences of pure action, a spectacle of movement of objects through space that film alone among the representational media can provide.

But the connection between film and trains may go deeper. The railway journey itself was a crucial event in the perceptual history of the nineteenth century, making accessible unseen landscapes and offering a new perspective on every landscape through which a train traveled. Much of what is most distinctive about nineteenth century American landscape art might be associated with the startling views brought back by the photographers who had been sent out into the American West as scenic prospectors for the transcontinental railroad, making images that combined, in a way characteristic of the nineteenth century (and one that would come to be so typical of the cinema itself), the romantic quest for the sublime with crass industrial commercialism. The railroad as much changed the way we see as it changed the way we travel and it is hard to resist shifting the account of its birth from the history of transportation to the proto-history of film.

Ken Jacobs' From Muybridge to Brooklyn Bridge, a grouping of films / performances presented as part of a Wrong Turn into Adventure series at MOMA, both reflects back on the tradition of train films and moves it forward, taking railroad actualities from the early history of film and allowing them, from across time and its associated history, to continue to bring us with new experiences. Film may be entering into its final days and, in the United States at least, passenger train service has been in decline for years, but as we stand close to the end of these histories, the films and film-performances in this show allow us to glimpse the unrealized potential found in some of the untaken turns of those histories.

The connection between film and trains is brought out in the first piece, Muybridge on Wheels, in which Jacobs gives in to the inevitable temptation to gently push Muybridge's motion studies across the divide between the prehistory of film and film itself. By alternatively projecting two slides of the full plates of the motion sequences offset in such a way that there is a sequential flickering between contiguous frames of the plate a series of continuous back and forth motions are established over all the images in the sequence. Placed in the context of the later train films, this back and forth motion retrospectively comes to call to mind the repetitive linear up and down movement of the mechanism that drives the continuous circular movement of both a steam locomotive's wheels and of a film projector's reel. Like Jacobs, Muybridge was a mechanical inventor as well as an explorer of visual phenomena, and Muybridge on Wheels neatly places the work of both artists into a common context.

Here, as elsewhere, however, Jacobs coaxes out a vibrant complexity out of the underlying structural simplicity of Muybridge's original works. The human and animal motions depicted by Muybridge are, for example, not in every sequence uniform and where the model shifts direction or changes velocity during its course a complex polyrhythm is created from the simultaneous depiction of individual frame alternations of varying size and perceived velocity. This rich rhythmic counterpoint forces the viewer to accommodate a projected field of surprising complexity. In one sequence, the movement of a horse is shown from a lateral perspective at top of the frame while the horse walks into the frame at the bottom: here the surface of the frame itself divides in two as the forward but not the lateral motion establishes a strong three-dimensional effect. The varied effects of these explorations of Muybridge's studies belie the mechanical processes used in the production of both the original images and in Jacobs' projected interventions and set the stage for the more explicit explorations of mechanized vision that follow.

One of the important roots of the modern interest in visual experience can be found in the romantic movement, many of whose members sought out experiences such as that of the sublime afforded by alpine vistas in an at times explicit response to the mechanistic explanations of perception given by science. Ironically, however, these artists created a taste for such vistas that and, with the invention of the railroad, tourists gained access to scenes that had previously gained their emotional power in part by being "remote, serene, and inaccessible" (Shelley, Mount Blanc). When Wordsworth wrote against the introduction of the railroad to England's Lake District, he was reacting against a growing transformation of the natural landscape into something akin to a travel-log subject or theme park ride.

In Disorient Express Jacobs confronts and redeems the detached experience of mountain landcsapes afforded by the excursion train and film.Using early footage of a train moving through a mountain landscape, Jacobs takes us from the excursion mentality of the passengers (who for some reason constantly wave handkerchiefs at the camera) to a perceived space that, while derived from the mountain landscape, provides a specifically filmic manifestation of the sublime. After showing the film on the right half of the screen, Jacobs then creates a kaleidoscope effect by matching the film on the right with a synchronized print of its mirror image on the left; although the landscape remains highly recognizable in this first intervention, the trip takes on a more dramatic character, with more sudden shifts of space and acceleration. These shifts remain as the mirrored film is projected upside-down but now, as the sky and the earth are reversed, we have the experience of moving through a vast, open, strange space, something like a bright, open, cavern, that is unlike anything found in nature. The original footage provides a journey through what has become a too familiar landscape and gives us only the barest glimpse of the experience that actually being in the mountains can afford us; by having a series of simple printing decisions executed, Jacobs provides a new experience that recaptures some of what had been lost.

Interventions into other early train footage, either in the form of printing decisions or, in the performed pieces, actions taken while shifting the image back and forth between two slightly out-of-synch images of the same film, similarly open up renewed possibilities of vision from footage that could seem old and stale. Brought to attention by Jacobs' own careful attending to the material, the footage comes alive, even when shown without intervention. Small events that might have been ignored suddenly take on new significance. A delicate, precise musical rhythm occurs when locomotive releases a puff of smoke and then quickly disappears into a turn; the appearance of a tiny dot of light at the end of a tunnel just before the train enters becomes extremely dramatic and places in relief Jacobs' audio-visual interventions into the filmed trip through the tunnel; glimpses of people pass by, especially one particular man standing on a frieght car, which might be barely noticed in a conventional projection, become consequential encounters as the time of the passing is distended; filming across the Brooklyn Bridge, a camera glimpses what seems to be ordinary transaction between conductor and passenger made poignant and mysterious by the passage of time. From Muybridge to Brooklyn Bridge might be seen as an implicit rejoinder to those who feared that machine vision would inevitably be reductively mechanical.

The program ended with a short film of Stern's duplex railway -- a mechanism that allows one of two trains on the same track to pass over the other; the film is comic but in context it reminds us of the odd by-ways of technological history -- such as the duplex projectors of Jacobs' Nervous System performances -- and what might have been lost as they were passed over.

The program thus begins and ends with Jacob's identification of himself with earlier inventors. This autobiographical element is perhaps not entirely accidental. Towards the end of the performance Jacobs played a short audio-tape of a telling of the Three Little Pigs to a child on a subway train that is in the Times Square station. The tape ends as the train leaves the station. In the program notes, Jacobs traces his interest in a non-standard alternatives to Hollywood film to teenaged excursions to screenings at the Museum of Modern Art. With this, the MOMA show -- just a couple of subway stops up from Times Square -- might be seen as kind of an homecoming to the place that helped Jacobs build his artistic house, that helped him get off the main track and take the`wrong turn into adventure' of the program's title.

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