From Southwark Fair to Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son Cinema of origins and origins of cinema

In 1968, American artist Ken Jacobs obtained a 16mm print of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, a film shot by G. W. Bitzer in 1905. Fascinated by this object, which borrows as primary visual source an engraving by William Hogarth (Southwark Fair, 1734), Jacobs minutely explored it by refilming the screen on which he projected it. The result is a critical work carried out with purely visual means, but also a puzzling cinematic experience that atomizes its own object of study.