Avant-garde auteur Ken Jacobs received critical adulation for his 1969 work Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son -- an extreme experimental film in which he visually dissected a Biograph one-reeler from 1905. Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks) revisits the same material for additional deconstruction. Divided into two halves, it begins with a sequence where a group of circus performers, villagers, and harlequins assemble in a small-town square for merriment; though the original sequence lasted about two minutes, here it takes up 50 minutes of time. Jacobs extends it ad infinitum, manipulating the images with digital 3-D imaging, zoom-ins, flicker effects, removal of various portions of the image, and a number of other visual and spatial devices. The second half of the film deconstructs a sequence in which characters chase a pig thief; by using flicker effects to dramatically slow down the action, Jacobs forces viewers to study the framing and the staging and enter a purely analytical mindset. In the concluding minutes, Jacobs abandons narrative altogether, reducing the onscreen images to a series of kaleidoscopic abstractions and unintelligible gray blocks. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi