Flo Jacobs

A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

A story told by director Ken Jacobs but without conventional storyline. Using a modified magic lantern, an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century, he morphs, flickering images that look like photo-negatives.

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.

A celebration of Ken Jacobs' work at 80WSE.

An adult decides to escape the pressures of life and return to his old bedroom at his parents' house.

An intimate and ongoing dialogue between filmmaker Paula Gaitán and Ken Jacobs. Filmed over the last decade in New York, the documentary reveals Jacobs' thinking and presents previously unseen footage of Ken and his partner in life and art, Flo Jacobs.

In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend Ken Jacobs is "interviewed" by my urbane 12-year old M.C., Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, and creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, I, as filmmaker turned "media artist", employ the full range of temporal manipulation available within my concurrent digital set-up, exploiting unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs' own work within the arcanum of film. The "musical score" is derived through permutations of the sync track. This was the first released section from the ongoing series, premiering March 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.

Blankets for Indians blends a stereoscopic study of water spurting from New York’s City Hall fountain with an intimately detailed portrait of an Occupy Wall Street march. While in the process of shooting the fountain in 2012, Jacobs serendipitously turned his camera toward a large protest marching to Zuccotti Park in support of Occupy Wall Street. The unexpected connection gives the film new life, seamlessly moving between sensual observation and political commentary, reflection, and abstraction. Using freeze-frames, text, and 3D manipulation, Jacobs questions the contemporary conditions of socio-political struggle, its relation to aesthetics, and the labor necessary to produce both.

In celebration of his 80th birthday, here is: THE ETERNAL COURTSHIP (an ipad short) For Ken and Flo Jacobs, with love and affection from all of us out here who bask in the glow...

A picturing of sound in 3D.

Ken Jacobs’s most elusive and mysterious film is at once an allegory of movie-making, a demonstration of 8mm versatility, and a celebration of a now vanished neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.