Razzle Dazzle The Lost World

Razzle Dazzle was one of eight Tribeca Film Festival premieres being showcased on Jaman. It is no longer available for download. To check out the other films in the Tribeca International Showcase and their screening times go to www.jaman.com/tribeca

A frequently returning Tribeca Film Festival filmmaker presents the world premiere of his new experimental narrative opus. RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World confirms Jacobs' mastery of digital filmmaking in which he treats the image as a painterly canvas, exploring the depths of cubism and abstract expressionism from source material comprising turn-of-the-cen tury stereopticon slides and an early Edison film.

One of the pre-eminent experimental filmmakers working today, Ken Jacobs first received international recognition with his 1969 Tom Tom The Piper's Son, in which he rephotographed a 1903 film as it was projected onto a wall, exploring the individual personalities beneath the characters and the teeming grain of the film emulsion. Decades later, Jacobs reimagines these effects in a new technical medium: the digital canvas; this experimental narrative opus magnificently displays his newfound mastery of the digital filmmaking domain. With source material comprising turn-of-the-century stereopticon slides and an Edison film from 1903, Jacobs exploits a full repertoire of digital techniques, continuing his lifelong inquiry into the activity that lies latent in the two-dimensional film frame. By manipulating the digital pixels he treats the image as a painterly canvas and exploits the illusion of depth in a way that evokes cubism and abstract expressionism. Figurative images bleed into abstraction; vivid colors play against frames of black and white; individual frames bubble up, become distorted, and rotate in dizzying configurations. Jacobs also achieves amazing 3-D effects without the audience's need for special viewing glasses through his patented ""Eternalism"" system. The artist's critique of the current state of world affairs underlies the visual pyrotechnics, as shots of the characters on a merry-go-round swerve in unsettling, ungrounded fashion and stereopticon images of domestic bliss are interrupted with scenes of violence. An audio track of Thomas Edison discoursing about war suggests that Jacobs finds solace in his creative universe, far away from the global destruction wrought by the powers-that-be.