by TWY

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The experience of watching Ken Jacobs’ A Primer in Sky Socialism is a bit like watch Jonas Mekas’ Walden, but at a different speed. But full disclosure, I have to admit at the fact that I couldn’t watch the film silently, in a theater I can, but not on my laptop. So I decided to put on a Daft Punk album, and with great pleasure I found how oddly the sound and image went together. The image and sound was never “synchronized,” like a silent film screening with accompaniment, but it was beautiful when the two elements would suddenly “sync” themselves, and after that, went separate ways, in order to meet again in the future. I wonder if Kenneth Anger (Scorpio Rising with Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet”) or Barbara Rubin (Christmas on Earth with song by The Kinks and The Ronettes) did the same in their films because of that. It’s a nice little fugue and I didn’t regret my sabotage. 

But back to the image, with its blurriness and ‘amateur’ quality, kind of like Mekas’ diary images but slowed down to remove the movement. I suppose that created time, different kinds of time as well: the duration of crossing the Brooklyn Bridge; time as seen in the traveling of light, frozen in the stills; and of course, the time of crossing into a new year, which surprised me and made me smile at the screen. It was the one bit of information in the opening text that I had forgot, but the moment where sudden Jacobs distort the image and revealing the text “2013/2014” looked like magic to me. It’s strange. When I was still little, I’d slept early even on New Year’s Eve, and when I woke up the next day, I’d said to myself “Happy New Year.” Now, as a young adult, I don’t sleep until 1 or 2 in the morning, that changed the crossing of the two years — I no longer feel any differences about the crossing. Of course, that’s why the adult created so many celebration event, where there’s a countdown, so they feel less lonely. But in Jacobs’ film I sensed a great sensation at the moment of the crossing, which he created using his images with such simplicity, on par with any great New Year’s Eve scenes in the history of cinema.

I didn’t really understand what Jacobs meant with “Sky Socialism,” but I suppose it was in that one particular image right before or after the crossing, where I saw a bunch of people all blurred into one another in the shadow. Perhaps it was that, against the closing image, that of the police cars.

_{A Primer in Sky Socialism is available for free on Ken Jacob’s Vimeo page.}