This article appeared in the November 7, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Courtesy of Azazel Jacobs.

In the summer of 1961, struggling filmmaker and painter Ken Jacobs was hitchhiking north from New York to look for work at a resort. Unable to land a job, he continued to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where his former art teacher Hans Hofmann had a studio available to painters. Walking into town after leaving some paintings to dry on the beach, Ken met Florence Karpf, another New York artist, who was studying at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and was there with an art-school friend, planning to draw portraits to make money. According to Ken in the 2011 book Optic Antics, after he asked the two if they knew a place where he could sleep for a dollar, “[Flo] immediately typed me as ‘a Brooklyn punk.’” But she loved his paintings. Ken and Flo were inseparable until their respective deaths 64 years later, in June and October of this year.

The spectacularly cluttered Chambers Street loft they lived in from 1966 was long the unofficial hearth and home of New York’s avant-garde film world. The high-ceilinged fifth-floor walk-up, warmly lit through a dusty skylight, was a bohemian enclave stuffed with books, paintings, drawings, photographs, film equipment, and so much more, all anchored by a dark, round wooden dining table. That table served as the meeting place for countless filmmakers, artists, students, and friends over the decades, as well as for family meals with Ken, Flo, their daughter Nisi Ariana (a multimedia artist), and their son Azazel (a film director and screenwriter whose 2008 fiction feature Momma’s Man was filmed in the loft, and stars his parents).

In the essential interview “Flo Talks!” Flo told critic Amy Taubin: “Ken said we had to have two kids [rather than just one] so we could spread the anxiety.” Anxiety about the state of the world partly fueled their art. Ken’s email handle was “nervousken,” and his films often revealed the workings and effects of imperialism, racism, and greed—as he proclaimed on his website, he was “looking forward to a world without money.” But a spirit of generosity, endless curiosity, and unconditional love filled the Chambers Street home, along with the irresistible aroma of Flo’s freshly baked pies. It is impossible to imagine this loft, and this world, without Ken and Flo.

Eternally gracious, her words carefully chosen and gently spoken, Flo was in some ways a contrast to Ken’s kinetic volubility. But though her gentle demeanor may have seemed like a calming influence on his chaotic energy, the two were equally strong-willed and fiercely connected in their creative drive and rebellious streaks. Flo discovered avant-garde cinema before meeting Ken, at a screening of Kenneth Anger’s surreal, homoerotic 1947 psychodrama Fireworks during her freshman orientation in 1959 at RISD. “I had never seen a film that someone made themselves,” she remembered, “and that was like art rather than a Hollywood film.” In a demonstration of her strong individuality, Flo was thrown out of art school in her senior year over creative differences. As she told Taubin, “The painting teachers and I no longer had rapport because I was no longer being obedient in terms of their suggestions . . . I thought their painting was horrible.”

While Flo would continue to paint throughout her life, she was also drawn to Ken’s films, starting with Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-1963) and Blonde Cobra (1963). These poetic works were deemed “Baudelairean Cinema” by Jonas Mekas in his influential Movie Journal column in The Village Voice. He proclaimed them to be part of “the real revolution in cinema today,” along with Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Ron Rice’s The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man (both 1963). Flo moved in with Ken on Ferry Street in 1963, devoting her life to their all-encompassing artistic and domestic partnership.

What’s the best way to credit Flo for her creative role in Ken’s films? As a de facto producer, she managed the countless details of fundraising, organization, and exhibition. She was also an all-around assistant. But most vitally, her aesthetic sensibility is embedded in the films and performances. “Flo’s ideas, Flo’s taste is in the work,” Ken said. Together they created an incomparable body of avant-garde cinema, spanning a mind-boggling array of forms and formats, from 8mm and 16mm films to video and digital works, often playing with invented forms of 3D such as Eternalisms, which built on Hans Hofmann’s ideas about the perception of depth on a flat screen. While many of the films contain original photography, usually shot on the city’s streets, Ken’s specialty was his work with found footage, such as Urban Peasants (1975), composed of home-movie footage from Flo’s Yiddish-speaking New York relatives.

Along with several cornerstone works such as Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son (1969/1971), and the seven-hour-plus magnum opus Star Spangled to Death (begun in the late ’50s and completed in 2004, with an anti-Trump message added in 2020), there are hundreds of shorter and lesser-known works (the Ken Jacobs Vimeo page is a treasure trove). At the core of this incredibly varied oeuvre, one finds a constant play between the two-dimensional abstraction of the screen and the three-dimensional physicality of the real world, the tension between past (what was filmed) and present (the work projected), and contrast between the stillness of the photograph and the kinetic nature of the moving image. As Jacobs said in an interview for his 1989 Museum of the Moving Image retrospective, “Advanced filmmaking leads to Muybridge.”

In the same interview, Ken describes how his childhood—he was born during the Depression in 1933 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—helped form his sensibility: “I spent my early years in a slum, and it was very beautiful to me. We had a little tiny backyard, tiny, and the fence of the backyard was made up of doors that had been thrown away . . . and there were different colors and different textures, and even painted differently, and the different paint jobs corroded in different ways, and this created my standard of beauty . . . Order is a reduction, and reductions shrink.” Or more succinctly, comparing his own films to those of Stan Brakhage: “He does art and I do garbage. I do New York City garbage.”

Some of Ken’s most important works were made with salvaged films found in bins at Canal Street photo shops. The Doctor’s Dream (1978) was made from one of these discarded films, a 1950s made-for-TV movie titled The Doctor, about a country doctor’s house call to a bedridden young girl. Ken systematically re-edited the found footage, freeing the shots from their plodding narrative, and revealing an undeniable sexual undercurrent, the potent subtext that simmers underneath. Perfect Film (1986) was made with another reel of film found on Canal Street, in this case a compilation of television news outtakes and raw B-roll filmed in Washington Heights on the day of Malcolm X’s assassination in 1965. Presenting that footage unedited, Perfect Film shows the process by which the chaos of life coheres into a narrative and the revelatory details that get cut out of the “official story.”

The special analytic 16mm film projector, which allows films to be slowed down for frame-by-frame analysis, was a constant presence in Ken’s classroom during his long career as a teacher in the Binghamton University cinema department, which he co-founded with Larry Gottheim in 1969 and where he taught until 2003. As film critic J. Hoberman, a former student, recalled, “as a teacher, he would regularly subject all manner of movies, from the works of D.W. Griffith to De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, to this sort of analysis. As his projectionist, I had the nerve-racking job of showing films backward, forward, and frame-by-frame as Ken improvised a pedagogical voiceover.” Through this dedication to close reading, he devised ways to make new films from old ones, zooming in and around the frame, delving into the grain of the celluloid strips to reanimate and excavate the previously unseen, a technique he employed in his own work as well. In Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, for example, he famously transforms a 10-minute silent film from 1905 into a nearly two-hour impressionistic masterpiece.

This approach eventually evolved into something the couple dubbed the Nervous System, a Rube Goldberg–like setup involving two interlocked analytic projectors and a manual system of shutters and motion control that Ken and Flo would operate together. Intensely choreographed, but allowing for improvisation, the Nervous System exhibitions were supremely labor-intensive and thrillingly ephemeral. Using strips of film that were rarely more than a minute long, Ken and Flo would create feature-length film performances, producing astonishing images that looked like nothing less than three-dimensional action paintings. A series of Nervous System pieces were titled The Impossible for the uncanny effects they achieved, but the name also emphasizes what a remarkable feat this whole enterprise was: these works were willed into existence only through the astonishing partnership of Ken and Flo Jacobs. In work, and in life, Ken and Flo uncovered an intensity and value in every moment. Their art was a process of revelation, and so was their daily life. As those of us who were fortunate enough to call them our friends knew, a walk from the Chambers Street loft to Chinatown for dim sum was, like their films, an adventure in perception, chaos, and beauty—the stuff of life.

David Schwartz is an independent programmer and writer, and president of the board of directors of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. He is curator-at-large at the Museum of the Moving Image, where he was chief curator of film for 28 years. He recently programmed the series “A Theater Near You” for the Museum of Modern Art and “Bo Widerberg’s New Swedish Cinema” for Film Forum.