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Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist ∗

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist ∗ Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist* MALCOLM TURVEY The work of Ken Jacobs, writes Tom Gunning in his seminal essay about the filmmaker, teaches us “to watch movies with a vision akin to both X-ray and microscope, uncovering what is concealed and paying attention to what is generally ignored.”1 Jacobs’s Perfect Film (1985)—a compilation of discarded outtakes from television news footage shot in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination—“reveals things that the people on camera never intended to reveal,”2 and in general, as Gunning put it to Jacobs in a 1989 interview, his works “reveal, unmask.” (To which Jacobs responded with a pun: “Reveal masks. Well, I agree with you.”)3 Gunning turns to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious—first advanced, according to Rosalind Krauss, in Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Small History of Photography”4—to understand Jacobs’s revelatory project: “Walter Benjamin declared that cinema shared with psychoanalysis an ability to probe into realms of reality of which we were not previously conscious,” Gunning remarks.5 Jacobs “uses the basic tools of his filmmaking to fracture the overwhelming familiarity of the moving image, blocking our most ingrained visual habits so that something else could take place.”6 In fact, as Gunning acknowledges, long before http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png October MIT Press

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist ∗

Turvey, Malcolm
October , Volume Summer 2011 (137) – Jul 1, 2011
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
© 2011 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ISSN
0162-2870
eISSN
1536-013X
DOI
10.1162/OCTO_a_00060
Publisher site
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Abstract

Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist* MALCOLM TURVEY The work of Ken Jacobs, writes Tom Gunning in his seminal essay about the filmmaker, teaches us “to watch movies with a vision akin to both X-ray and microscope, uncovering what is concealed and paying attention to what is generally ignored.”1 Jacobs’s Perfect Film (1985)—a compilation of discarded outtakes from television news footage shot in the immediate aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination—“reveals things that the people on camera never intended to reveal,”2 and in general, as Gunning put it to Jacobs in a 1989 interview, his works “reveal, unmask.” (To which Jacobs responded with a pun: “Reveal masks. Well, I agree with you.”)3 Gunning turns to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious—first advanced, according to Rosalind Krauss, in Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Small History of Photography”4—to understand Jacobs’s revelatory project: “Walter Benjamin declared that cinema shared with psychoanalysis an ability to probe into realms of reality of which we were not previously conscious,” Gunning remarks.5 Jacobs “uses the basic tools of his filmmaking to fracture the overwhelming familiarity of the moving image, blocking our most ingrained visual habits so that something else could take place.”6 In fact, as Gunning acknowledges, long before

Journal

October – MIT Press

Published: Jul 1, 2011

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