Celebrating Ken and Flo Jacobs at The Film-Makers' Cooperative

Ken and Flo Jacobs were founding members of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and essential to its history, through their own work and the work of the many artists they educated and supported. We celebrate Ken and Flo with a program of three works that show the vitality and variety of their art. Soft Rain is a lyrical, structural study filmed from a downtown loft window; Keaton’s Cop is a found footage gem from a slice of a Buster Keaton short; and Seeking the Monkey King is a dazzling and ominous digital work that finds a universe of wonder and horror through photography of a piece of household detritus.

This is the last program of The Whole Shebang, a city-wide month-long celebration of Ken and Flo Jacobs, organized by Andrew Lampert. 

Soft Rain

(1968, 16mm, color, silent, 12 min.)

Three identical prints of a single 100-ft. fixed-camera take are shown from beginning to end-roll light far…A fine rain-mist is confused, visually, with the color emulsion grain…Anticipation for familiar movement-complexes builds, and as smaller complexities join up in our knowledge of the whole the purely accidental counter-passings of people and vehicles becomes satisfyingly cogent, seems rhythmically structured and of a piece. Become choreography.” 

Keaton's Cops

(1991, 16mm, black and white, silent, 18 min.)

Some films are a joy to look at repeatedly, and also separately in their various parts. This is the bottom quarter, or fifth, of Cops. 

Seeking the Monkey King 

(2011, digital, color, sound, 40 min.)

This film could have been called Kicking and Screaming but that only describes me in the process of making it, questioning its taste…Seeking the Monkey King is a reversion to my mid-twenties and that sense of horror that drove the making of Star Spangled to Death.