RPM Festival and the Brattle Theatre join together to pay tribute to two of experimental cinema’s most beloved and influential figures, Ken Jacobs (1933–2025) and Florence “Flo” Jacobs (née Karpf, 1941–2025). The screening honors their extraordinary artistic partnership and decades of groundbreaking work that challenged cinematic conventions and expanded the boundaries of moving-image art.

A heralded filmmaker, distinguished professor at SUNY Binghamton, and defining presence in avant-garde cinema for decades, Ken Jacobs left an indelible mark on global film culture. His anarchic and uncompromising works—including BLONDE COBRA (1963), STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH (1956/2004), and the structuralist masterpiece TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON (1969)—redefined how audiences experience, perceive, and understand cinema.

Beginning with FLO ROUNDS A CORNER (1999), Jacobs also produced a remarkable stream of mind-bending digital videos that, in many ways, brought his artistic practice full circle to his early days as a painter. His lifelong investigation of movement, perception, texture, and the material properties of images remains central to his enduring influence.

Florence Jacobs was Ken’s partner in life and an essential collaborator throughout his artistic journey. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the pair developed pioneering live-cinema and shadow-play performances that transformed film projection into an unpredictable, immersive art form. Through their double-projection “nervous system” and their “nervous magic lantern,” which conjured phantasmagorical three-dimensional images, Ken and Flo created singular, homespun spectacles that pushed the possibilities of analog film and digital cinema far beyond conventional limits.

At the heart of this tribute is Ken Jacobs’s TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON, a radical and enduring work that transforms a 1905 Biograph short into an essential cinematic experience. Through re-photography and meticulous manipulation of the original footage, Jacobs reveals dimensions hidden within the film’s seemingly simple images, bringing their surface textures, intricate structures, and spatial depth into startling relief. His approach reflects an enduring interest in painting and perception, shaped in part by his studies with the influential painter Hans Hofmann.

The film also brings renewed attention to the physical traces of cinema and the lives preserved within its images. Jacobs draws out the energetic performances of the original actors, whose silent-film gestures predate even the innovations of D. W. Griffith, transforming them into haunting, almost ethereal presences. Although viewers encounter the original film in its entirety for a second time through an altered perceptual experience, the work’s symphonic coda offers a poignant final gesture: a farewell to Tom, Tom, marked by white leader and a visible splice.

Together, Ken and Flo Jacobs created a body of work that remains as challenging, playful, and visionary as ever. This tribute celebrates their extraordinary contributions to experimental cinema and their shared commitment to discovering new ways of seeing.

Program:

Perfect Film | 1986 | 22 minutes | 16mm

Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son | 1969 | 115 minutes | 16mm

Little Stabs at Happiness | 1962 | 15 minutes | 16mm

Please visit revolutionsperminutefest.org for more information.

Revolutions per Minute Festival (RPM Fest) is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, experimental film, essay film, animation, documentary, video and audiovisual performance, and is co-hosted by Art and Art History Department and Cinema Studies at UMass-Boston, Brattle Theatre in Cambridge & Harvard FAS CAMLab.

Brattle Passes Accepted