We See Absence (part one of Circling Zero)

Improvised personal video documentary by an experimental film maker with an extremely large oeuvre, shot with a simple consumer video camera. This film is the first part of an intended trilogy entitled We See Absence. The following two parts, that will also last about two hours, are called A Pipeline Through Afghanistan Will Cheer Us and Ourselves At A Distance – strikingly politically loaded titles for a film maker who became famous with virtually abstract work. Jacobs regards this work as a kind of home movie, a return to the innocence of an amateur status, with which he reports on the events after 11 September 2001 in his own surroundings. The unedited video shots that Nisi Jacobs made of the moment of the attacks form part of the film. The second part provides impressions of the many spontaneous mourning altars that were erected on Union Square in Manhattan. Jacobs does not comment on events, apart from in the selection of his recordings. He looks round with an open, but apparently experienced eye in the so suddenly changed surroundings with their so suddenly changed people. The film is spontaneous and unpolished and manages to catch the amazement of the moment so well. Every inch around Ground Zero seems to have been filmed a hundred times, but Jacobs took his time to really look.