Nissan Ariana Window. Courtesy of Ken Jacobs.
Screening & Live Event
Flo Rounds a Life: Films by Ken Jacobs
With Ken Jacobs in person
Avant-garde film pioneer Ken Jacobs celebrates his 80th birthday this year; Anthology Film Archives and the Museum of Modern Art have observed the occasion with special screenings of his work. Moving Image joins the festivities by celebrating the remarkable artistic and personal partnership between Ken and Flo Jacobs; they have been together for more than a half-century, and Flo has played a vital role in Jacobs’s work and his life, which are inseparably intertwined. Pregnant Flo is beautifully on view in the 1969 16mm film Nissan Ariana Window and in the landmark end-of-20th-century digital short Flo Rounds a Corner, and she stars in Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman, as Jacobs revisits and digitally manipulates stereographic images of Flo, family, and friends from the 1960s.
Nissan Ariana Window
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 1969, 14 mins. 16mm. “Nissan Ariana Window is three-quarters of our daughter's name. She was just a kid when these pictures were taken. Some were taken before she was born: pregnant Flo together with pregnant cat China sunning themselves under the skylight.” (Ken Jacobs)
Flo Rounds a Corner
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 1999, 6 mins. Digital projection. Silent. “The eponymous Flo moves slanted and enchanted down a street in Taormina, Italy—as casual, momentous and as 'on time' as the Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat that rounded the corner of another century. A landmark work." (Mark McElhatten)
Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 2012, 47 mins. Digital projection. With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs, Antoine Catala, Jason Drakeford. “Animations of home stereo-pairs from the 1960s on, cyclopean because the 3-D can be seen with one eye. Flo stars, friends appear in the Kodachrome past, images of Nisi and Aza demarcate time.” (Ken Jacobs)
