The retrospective Seeing Through Film 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. 
 
One of the American avant-garde’s most prolific figures, Ken Jacobs (1933-2025) and his wife and lifelong collaborator Flo Jacobs (1941-2025) were an integral part of the New York alternative film scene. From the monumental Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son to the 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. 
 
A true and native New Yorker, Jacobs studied painting with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann but quickly gravitated toward film. His early friendship with Jack Smith resulted in playfully subversive collaborations such as Little Stabs At Happiness, Blonde Cobra and Star Spangled To Death. In later work, actors and narrative give way to a cinema that revolves around the act of viewing: “There’s already so much film. Let’s draw some of it out for a deeper look, toy with it, take it into a new light with inventive and expressive projection. Freud would suggest doing so as a way to look into our minds.” 
 
In 1966 Jacobs and his wife Flo established the legendary Millennium Film Workshop. He 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. 
 
Live performance became Ken and Flo Jacobs’ primary creative outlet in the 1970s. They presented 3D shadow-plays and developed the Nervous System, an analytical, hallucinatory, two-projector apparatus. A further evolution was the Nervous Magic Lantern, an expanded cinema performance reminiscent of 19th century phantasmagoria which used no film technology at all and was “the culmination of a long life of indulging illogical urges with mind set on seeing mutable deep space.” Jacobs enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking in the late 1990s, finally realising “Eternalisms” that created illusions of depth and eternal movement from just two alternating frames.  
 
This retrospective, which begins a month before the festival and stretches into May, is far from exhaustive; it can only represent a small proportion of Jacobs’ rich and enduring career. There are so many more incredible works that we can only hint toward through this selection.  
 
With special thanks to Azazel Jacobs, William Rose and Mark Webber.

Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969-71) is screening at the Barbican as a festival prologue on Thursday 12 March. Star Spangled to Death (1956-61/2014) will screen at the Barbican on Sunday 10 May.

Seeing Through Film
by William Rose

Ken Jacobs was perennially interested in testing the boundaries of vision. He often claimed to be waiting for the “talented viewer” of his work to materialise. For him, this provocation was not just about rethinking pedestrian attitudes towards the cinema, but about blurring the boundaries between creator and spectator and challenging the eye’s appetite and capacity for perception. What mattered most for Jacobs was the encounter between a work and an audience who were prepared to meet its demands.

Jacobs extended his challenge for “talented” viewing first and foremost to himself. A cinephile from a young age – after discovering his high school had a pass that granted him free access to MoMA – his vast body of work emerged from an avid, lifelong practice of spectatorship and a commitment to seeing and re-seeing: to testing what can actually be perceived, rather than what is merely presumed to be there. He described Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema collection as “one of the worst ideas ever” – because what is essential, is inherently personal. Underscoring his dedication to attend seriously to anything that might yield itself to looking, Jacobs once said that he was interested in “looking at air, if there’s discernible change frame to frame.”

Yet, for Jacobs, an insistence on conscious viewing did not mean assuming total authorial control of the work. Rather, he frequently sought to create conditions and environments that would gesture the viewer towards meanings, not yet known or discovered, and towards points of communion. His work was uniquely participatory, sometimes explicitly demanding that the audience assume an active and conscious role.

Jacobs’ cinematic interventions and his “seeing through film” took on many forms. In Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969–71), he slowed down and burrowed into grainy film footage from Billy Bitzer’s 1905 film of the same name, as if uncovering new routes of access to its images. In Opening the 19th Century: 1896 (1990), he asks the audience to view early Lumière films through a Pulfrich filter, similarly conjuring the effect of new depths in previously flat or familiar images. In The Whole Shebang (1982/2019), Jacobs “eternalised” brief sequences of frames to suspend gestures and movements and create openings to new spatial and temporal dimensions. And in The Doctor’s Dream(1977), he exposed a narrative subconscious in a seemingly innocuous short film through reorganising its structure.

If these works demonstrate Jacobs’ willingness to intervene into the ways an image is received, this represents only part of his practice. Equally significant were moments in which he chose not to alter the material at all, allowing it to appear in its raw or provisional state. Here authorship shifted away from formal manipulation and toward the conditions of presentation and collective viewing, implicitly asking: what kind of spectator can we be? By leaving certain materials untouched, Jacobs placed increased responsibility on the viewer, not only to look attentively, but to recognise how meaning is made through context, framing and the politics of viewership itself.

The commitment to treating certain films as readymades is exemplified in Perfect Film (1986), a work which consists entirely of 16mm footage he chanced upon in a Canal Street junk shop where it was being sold for the reel it was attached to. The material – unused outtakes from a television newscast filmed in Manhattan immediately after Malcolm X’s assassination – was, to Jacobs’ mind, already perfect and revealing in its hacked-together form. With this material, the filmmaker’s artistic gesture was not to manipulate it, or to interpret it, but simply to copy and to circulate it, allowing the images to speak for themselves and to self-indict.

This faith in the latent energy of fragmented film had an earlier precedent. During a brief stint working as assistant to the artist Joseph Cornell in 1958, Jacobs encountered a comparable sensibility in Rose Hobart (1936), Cornell’s radical reworking of East of Borneo (1931). He found its choppiness, its incoherence, and its willingness to let “the details, the fragments, say more than the whole” thrilling. For Jacobs, the film’s energy lay not in narrative continuity but in its emotionally effective internal logic, operating entirely aside from the intentions of the original.

Another enduring aspect of Jacobs’ practice was his creation of and participation within social experiments – ones entirely cohesive with his film work – which enabled the hyper-politicised and attentive mode of viewership that he was endlessly seeking. These experiments came in many forms: his classroom at SUNY Binghamton, which former student Richard Herskowitz described as a place not where students “watch experimental films” but where they “learned to watch films experimentally”, is just one example. Others include Jacobs’ founding the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966, which he described as “my chance to create socialism here and now”, or his regular contributions to the Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run venue in New York City, founded in 1973 by some of his first cinema students. All of these projects shared a common goal: to emancipate images from dominant cultural expectations and to cultivate an open-ended approach to both making and watching films.

This concern with the conditions of collective viewing was enacted early on in the informal screenings Jacobs organised in his Ferry Street loft in the early 1960s, under the moniker Spunky’s Picture Palace. Filling a gap left by Jonas Mekas’s early screenings of New American Cinema in New York City – which were frequently disrupted due to licensing and censorship issues – Jacobs presented semi-regular programs in his loft. Entry was reduced if attendees “brought their own culture,” and programmes were largely assembled on the fly, drawing on whatever materials were available, whether films contributed by attendees (including the Kuchar Brothers), prints borrowed from the New York Public Library, or Jacobs’ own work and his various discoveries. Spunky’s was high-key democratic: if someone wanted to see a film, Jacobs would show it. Programming functioned less as conventional curation than as a collective act of watching.

It was in this context that Jacobs first presented an early iteration of Star Spangled to Death (1956–61), a seven-and-a-half-hour work, perhaps the apotheosis of all the sensibilities discussed here, showing Ken the political activist, the programmer, the archivist, the gleaner, and the spectator all at once. Started in 1956, and committed to its final form in 2004, Star Spangled to Death is unmistakably a long-gestated and deeply-considered work of art. But it might also be thought of as an extended form of film programming: a collage of films, home movies, and found footage presented in their entirety, sometimes altered, sometimes left untouched. Its logic follows that of Jacobs’ home screenings, in which attention, patience, and the capacity to see beyond conventional narrative were required of the viewer.

Over the course of its long production, Star Spangled to Death was staged in numerous concert versions, absorbing an extraordinary range of material, including home-movie footage shot by Jacobs’ father, sequences shot by Jacobs himself with Jack Smith and Jerry Sims, full-length “documentary” films such as Mother Love (Harold Mayer, 1960), racist cartoons and suspect ethnographic films, Nixon’s Checkers speech, and other archival footage from twentieth-century American history and culture. Over the years, these concerts showcased different arrangements and juxtapositions of the material, before being fixed into digital form in 2004. As Jacobs described it so vividly, returning to his trope of the “talented viewer”: “It was supposed to lie in a jumbled heap, errant energies going nowhere, the talented viewer inferring form. A Frankenstein that fizzled but twitching and still dangerous to approach. Thoroughly star spangled but still kicking.”

Shown unaltered, the material is permitted to “self-indict”. Its meanings emerge not through manipulation or commentary but through the pressure of sustained, attentive viewing and framing. After all, Jacobs’ ultimate experiment is not on the image but on us.

William Rose is a UK-based curator, producer and researcher working in artists’ moving image. He is the editor of Ken Jacobs: I Walked Into My Shortcomings (2026).