“The cinema is always as perfect as it can be”

But not all structural films had warm welcomes. The Museum of Art screening of Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son produced the first mass audience walk-out in the Film Section’s history. Ken Jacobs’ film was an expansion of a 1905 ten-minute short by Billy Bitzer. Jacobs’ is a microscopic examination of fragments of the already grainy and contrasty Bitzer images. It bored nearly everyone and provoked Chuck Glassmire — one of the city’s most devoted advocates of experimental cinema — into questioning his own devotion to the avant-garde.

That’s Robert A. Haller writing about the Carnegie Museum of Art’s January 3, 1971 screening of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), a film that didn’t bore me, in Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh in the 1970s. Pittsburgh has grown to love Jacobs since then: in recent years his work has screened at Jefferson Presents, at Melwood as part of the Black Maria Film Festival, and at the Three Rivers Film Festival, where he also made an appearance as an actor last year in his son Azazel Jacobs’ The GoodTimesKid (2005). Is it too much to hope for that his most recent film, Razzle Dazzle (2007), will eventually find its way here as well? The two films I’ve seen, Tom, Tom and Pushcarts of Eternity Street (2006), both cry out to be seen on the big screen and it sounds like this one does as well.

Razzle Dazzle opened at Anthology Film Archives in New York on June 27 and runs through July 3. David Hudson has put up a post at GreenCine Daily to collect responses to the film, including one by David Phelps at videoarcadia that calls it one half of “the double feature of the year” along with WALL·E (2008), of all things. I mostly want to see the pretty colors, which are on display in a post David Phelps wrote for another blog, The Auteurs’ Notebook (I couldn’t resist stealing one of his screencaps to top this post).

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