Submitted for Your Approval, #2: Movie That Invites Pausing (Ken Jacobs, 2020) (Patreon)

On the one hand, Movie That Invites Pausing covers familiar territory for Ken Jacobs. His work with pulsating forms, and in particular the complex play of flatness and depth generated with his Eternalism video system, resembles relatively recent works such as Krypton is Doomed (2005) and Seeking the Monkey King (2011). As in those films, here Jacobs is operating with essentially abstract surfaces and using gradual motion, along with the gentle optical disruptions of flicker, to imply depth -- at first subtle and painterly, eventually cavernous, like an interstellar landscape.

MTIP, which is Jacobs' homage to his painting teacher Hans Hofmann, is "about" push and pull, which was the primary formal subject of Hoffmann's canvases. In the film, Jacobs begins with an explicitly flat pattern -- something like a plastic honeycomb form, or a close-up of a sidewalk grating or a Rubbermaid mat -- and by rotating it and manipulating the light, he "opens" it up into a dynamic spatial field. 

If we take Jacobs at his word (and why not?), this is a different kind of film than he's ever made before, because he's inviting us to "pause" it (after a single viewing all the way through, he asks). Why? Well, doing so offers the ability to turn this abstract whirlygig into a set of captured "paintings," or at least photographs of a Man Ray / Minor White sort. If the Eternalism method is about using the vocabulary of the visual arts to complicate our relationship to "the movies," Movie That Invites Pausing allows us to move in reverse and take apart the abstraction, treating it like a motion study. Instead of a Muybridge project, where we see micro-segments of human or animal locomotion, Jacobs provides snippets of a process of visual reorientation. What is it we are looking at? We don't know, exactly -- only the process of looking.

Watch Movie That Invites Pausing here.