Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

Tom, Tom begins and nearly ends with an old film of the same title made in Hollywood in 1905, quoted entirely both times. For approximately ninety minutes (the original lasts about ten inutes), Jacobs gives us his variations on the images and movements of that film. His Tom, Tom, as oppsed to the original, has grainy, pointillist texture (an inevitable result of filming off a screen or a home made optival printer, which the structural cinema has capitalized on) and a compressed sense of space. In transposing, he changed the time of the original with slow motion, the scale with close-ips of background detail, the sequeantial order with repetitions and backward movements, and above all the kineses by radically retarding the narrative of the original.
(P.Adams Sitney)