RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World

2006, 92 min, color, sound

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

Ken Jacobs writes: "RAZZLE DAZZLE is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space. They look out - from their place at the start of the 20th century - with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive. We observe them but of course they see nothing of this, our America, hopelessly gone to rot, its mountaintops leveled for extraction of coal, rivers and air polluted, crisscrossed everywhere with property-lines; they don't see its prisons or the corporations leaning in from their off-shore tax-bases to see what more they can take. Early stereopticon images also appear, digitally manipulated to reveal their depths. A digital shadow falls upon the scene and yet, grim as things get, as our crimes and failures then and now commingle, the movie proceeds with a cubist/abstract-expressionist zest."

Click here for a preview of RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World, in its entirety.

Assisted by Erik Nelson, Flo Jacobs. Cinematographer: A.C. Abadie, 8 July 1903, Wilmington Springs, Delaware. Music: Morphium - Mischa Spoliansky, Composer/Pianist - Berlin 1927. 12-inch 78 rpm records: Flora Bella - (Schwarzwald), Miss Springtime - (Kalman). In Shadowland - (Brothers). Delilah - (Nicholis). Ladders of Roses - (Hubbell). On The Shore At Le Lei Wi - (Kallimai and Kern). Performed by Prince's Orchestra, Columbia Records.

 
 

WARNING: This work contains throbbing light. Should not be viewed by individuals with epilepsy or seizure disorders.

 
 

See also

 
 
2010, 303 min, b&w, color and anaglyph 3-D, sound