In Celebration of Ken and Flo Jacobs

L’Alliance joins venues throughout New York City in celebration of the life of the city’s beloved native son and daughter, artists and filmmakers Ken and Flo Jacobs, who both passed away in 2025. Over sixty years of marriage and collaboration, Ken and Flo created a legacy of work, exhibition and film study that has deeply influenced generations of audiences and students of cinema. We owe them everything.

This program presents two works of French cinema: Ken Jacobs’ silent short Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896, a repurposing of Lumière cameraman footage screened in 3D using The Pulfrich Effect (filters to be provided), “wherein a delay of light via a dark filter before one eye enables two frames with two perspectives from a moving camera-shot to reach the mind simultaneously”(Ken Jacobs), and Jean Vigo’s classic of childhood anarchy, Zéro de conduite, a favorite of Jacobs’ of which he wrote, “I wasn’t much older than the kids in the film… Astonished by the dismissal of all censorship… Years later I’d be thwarted in my effort to name Binghamton’s new cinema department The Jean Vigo School of Film-making.”

Opening of the Nineteenth Century: 1896
Dir. Ken Jacobs, 1991, 11min, digital, courtesy of Azazel Jacobs and Nisi Ariana

Zéro de conduite
Dir. Jean Vigo, 1933, 44 min, 35mm, courtesy Janus Films

With very special thanks to Andrew Lampert.