Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son | |
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Directed by | Ken Jacobs |
Release date
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Running time
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115 minutes |
Country | United States |
Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son is a 1969 experimental film made by Ken Jacobs. The film is considered a landmark in avant-garde and structural filmmaking, and remains Jacobs' best-known work. It was admitted to the National Film Registry in 2007, and is part of Anthology Film Archives' "Essential Cinema" repertory.
In a meticulous experiment in rephotography, Jacobs deconstructs, manipulates, and recontextualizes a small fragment of found footage: a 1905 film showing a group of people chasing a thief through a barn, "shot and probably directed by G.W. ‘Billy’ Bitzer, rescued via a paper print filed for copyright purposes with the Library of Congress," according to Jacobs. Jacobs' refashioning of the footage is an essayistic meditation on the nature of cinematic representation; in the words of Chicago Reader critic Fred Camper, it is "a film about watching movies."