Return to the Scene of the Crime.

"Autumn's the season, it seems, for reinvented memories - didn't I just review Ashes of Time Redux? - and avant-garde pioneer Ken Jacobs's latest, Return to the Scene of the Crime, is doubly so for containing revisitations within a revisitation." Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.

"Of course, Tom, Tom the Piper's Son, Ken Jacobs's 1969 feature that turned a 1905 Biograph Studios short inside out, isn't a 'crime'; patience-testing, maybe, but certainly not an offense against humanity," writes David Fear in Time Out New York. "Yet the avant-garde filmmaker had indeed returned to the scene, and he's found new elements to be mined and manipulated."

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook: "From the abstract movements of clothing in grainy black and white, the plastic metamorphosis of film frames digitized and filling in the gaps between the frames to create a new kind of animated film, to such more conventionally cinematic, or at least theatrical pleasures as underscoring short film's open framing that lets a crowd of people and characters wander in and off of dramatic space, the video is structured in 13 parts that look at film in at the very least 13 very different ways. Return to the Scene of the Crime, like some kind of ideal film viewer, sees the moving image as a bountiful expression of nearly everything that life encompasses."

Ken Jacobs: Filmmaker Extraordinaire runs at MoMA through October 24.

Posted by dwhudson at October 17, 2008 8:04 AM