The retrospective Seeing Through Film celebrates the work and lives of Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025. 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. 

New York, seen through the eyes of Ken Jacobs. 
 
Orchard Street, dir. Ken Jacobs, USA 1955/2017, 27 mins
“My first film was about Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. This was the 50s. I needed a contained thing to film. I couldn't afford the car fare to travel around New York. And I lived right next to Orchard Street. It is a jumble of stores crushed together and a huge crowd of people walking through the streets looking for bargains. I was already very critical of capitalism, and this was a strange outgrowth of capitalism, but I began to film it. World War II had happened recently. This was a very Jewish street, and what had happened with Nazis through World War II was always on our mind. This was a world where terrible things could happen and some way I had to come to terms with that, which I never have. But it's a portrait. I saw many stories happening in tiny gestures.” (Ken Jacobs) 

Window, Ken Jacobs, USA 1964, 12 mins, 16mm 
Window and Soft Rain are films shot in the Jacobs’ loft that demonstrate Jacobs’ talent for investigating space, influenced by his mentor Hans Hofmann, and anticipating the avant-garde’s Structural movement  

“The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. […] About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice.” (Ken Jacobs) 

Soft Rain, dir. Ken Jacobs, USA 1968, 12 mins, 16mm
 “A camera ‘stares’ out of a window onto a street for about nine minutes (actually, a three-minute segment repeated three times); nothing is staged; there is no editing, no camera movement; reality flows by, Zen-like, and is recorded. The image is mostly still, except for a few cars and pedestrians; these become events. There is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety; its ‘form; is the unstructured matrix of reality.” (Amos Vogel) 

Perfect Film, dir. Ken Jacobs, USA 1986, 22 mins, 16mm
The rushes of a news report on the assassination of Malcolm X, just as they were found on a bin. “A lot of film is perfect left alone, perfectly revealing in its un- or semi-conscious form. I wish more stuff was available in its raw state, as primary source material for anyone to consider, and to leave for others in just that way, the evidence uncontaminated by compulsive proprietary misapplied artistry, ‘editing,’ the purposeful ‘pointing things out’ that cuts a road straight and narrow through the cine-jungle, we barrel through thinking we’re going somewhere and miss it all.” (Ken Jacobs)