“Warning ‘-- Throbbing Light: not for persons afflicted with epilepsy.” This caution occurs at the outset of Ken Jacob’s “Ghetto Fishmarket: New York City - 1903,” a film produced in 2006, but consisting of two-hours plus digital manipulation of footage shot with one of Edison’s cameras 103 years before. Two parasols protecting merchants seem to have been brightly colored, although the movie, of course, is grainy black and white. Those parasols are inscribed “All Cars Transfers to BLOOMINGDALES”. For an instant, about 90 minutes into the film, the legend “Impeach Bush and Cheney” flashes across one of parasols. Jacobs has commenced his movie by telling us (via titles) that this “two-hour abstract film” is an escape from the squalid present of “imperialistic fiascos,” that the fish-market was near the place where the World Trade Center would later be built -- the film, Jacobs suggests, is a sort of hermitage, a retreat from the miseries of the present and, indeed, implicitly invokes a boisterous mercantile past when America was a beacon to the world and the refuge of the humiliated, the despised, and the persecuted. The movie is supposed to be ludic, a field of abstract, apolitical play. In theory, these concepts seem reasonable and the Edison “paper print” of the teeming fish-market is fascinating, a Brueghel-like tapestry of small, interesting events captured by the objective eye of the camera that slowly scans the crowd, moving in stately progression through the sun-dappled human landscape -- the shadows suggest that it is either ten a.m. or 2:00 pm -- from right to left. But Jacobs’ execution, like our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is terribly flawed. The picture is, at least, 90 minutes too long and almost all of the digital manipulations of the original documentary film are pointless, uncommunicative, and unnecessarily protracted. The micro-history on display in the ancient film is sufficiently interesting to engage the eye and the mind and Jacobs’ interventions are designed, it seems, to make watching the film difficult, painful, tedious -- he willfully obscures things that we would like to see. The humble fish-market footage is stretched like taffy, digitized into nebulae of white and grey specks, for twenty minutes blurred into a spectral landscape where periodically the eye imagines itself to be seeing ghastly skulls and cadavers. Sometimes, the footage appears upside-down or spiraling or densely saturated with solarized color. For thirty minutes, at least, Jacobs stutters the image frame by frame back and forth, the pictures sometimes printed right to left and, then, inverted. The effect is initially interesting -- the pictures seem to move while somehow remaining frozen and the flicker creates a stereoscopic depth to the image. But it just goes on and on and on, accompanied periodically by hideous caterwauling, clicking sounds like electronic popcorn popping, a scrambling noise that resembles rat’s claws on wood, atonal plinking and plonking, gibberish whispered over a woman whining in Yiddish and so on. One longs for the analytical approach of someone like Errol Morris, an presentation of this intrinsically fascinating material that would make sense of things that we see -- why are two women floridly fighting with operatic gestures, hands clutched to their massive bosoms, who is the little hideous homunculus who glares up at the camera from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, and who is the man who seems to be drunk and makes an obscene gesture toward the camera before defiantly planting his hands on his hips and glaring up at the photographer? The children and men peer curiously at the camera. The women are much too engaged in shopping to even notice that they are being filmed.
No comments:
Post a Comment