As a prologue to the retrospective Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs, Open City Documentary Festival and the Barbican’s Experiments in Film present Ken Jacobs’ 1969 structural film classic.

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son 
Ken Jacobs, 1969-71, USA, 16mm, silent, 115 min

The original Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son was filmed in 1905 by Billy Bitzer (D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer). It is one of the 3,000 movies made between 1896 and 1912 that exist today only because it was deposited at the Library of Congress as a paper print. Through various filmic manipulations, Jacobs transformed this 10-minute film into a two-hour study of filmmaking, vision and composition. As he has said, Tom, Tom “is most reverently examined”. This masterpiece of found footage cinema represented a turning point in Jacobs’ film work, refocusing his attention to investigating perception itself, working often with found images.

“I wanted to ‘bring to the surface’ that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force-areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape … to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame … stirred to life by a successive 16-24 pattering on our retinas, the teaming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion.” (Ken Jacobs)

With an introduction by Mark Webber (The Visible Press)

One of the American avant-garde’s most prolific figures, Ken Jacobs (1933-2025) enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking in the late 1990s. From the monumental Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son to his Nervous Magic Lantern performances and more recent digital and 3D explorations, Jacobs was an artist whose work is an uncompromised declaration of love for cinema. An activist and a teacher as well as a filmmaker, Jacobs was an integral part of the New York alternative film scene since the 1950s. In 1966, together with his wife Flo, he established the legendary Millennium Film Workshop. Jacobs was also the co-founder – with Larry Gottheim – of one of the USA’s first cinema departments at SUNY Binghamton, where he taught for several decades, influencing subsequent generations of filmmakers and artists such as Phil Solomon, Mark LaPore, J. Hoberman, Art Spiegelman and Lee Ranaldo.

The retrospective Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs at Open City Documentary Festival 2026 celebrates the work and lives of Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025. It coincides with the publication of I Walked Into My Shortcomings, an anthology of Jacobs’ writings edited by William Rose for The Visible Press.