Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

Ken Jacobs, born in Brooklyn, and his wife Flo were among the avant-garde filmmakers and programmers who aimed to create space for what was referred to as “other cinema” – works that explore both the technical-material side of film as well as the non-dramaturgical meaning of film footage.

What was film, really? And how could one draw the viewer into the projection of image sequences that acted directly on the eye’s lens, the imagination, and the subconscious? What if you made the very materiality of celluloid the subject of your film? Or tried to create three-dimensional effects on a flat projection surface – without 3D glasses?

These were the kinds of questions that Ken and Flo Jacobs explored. Their curiosity about stretching the very idea of what film could be was shared by pioneers of the postwar (New York) film avant-garde, among them Jonas Mekas (with Jacobs co-founder of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative), Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, and Jack Smith, director of the notorious Flaming Creatures (Smith also appeared as an actor in Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs at Happiness, both from 1963).

A Poetic Slow-Motion Meditation

Ken Jacobs’ most famous work is Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), a groundbreaking experiment in “re-photography” that has since become emblematic of structuralist film.

For Tom, Tom… Jacobs filmed the projection of a found-footage short from 1905, possibly shot by Billy Bitzer, D.W. Griffith’s favourite cameraman. Jacobs then manipulated Bitzer’s images — reversing them, slowing them down to stillness, stretching them like chewing gum — as if challenging the molecular structure of the old celluloid itself.

The resulting 115-minute film is a haunting, poetic slow-motion meditation in close-up on the alchemical process of filmmaking. Its structure is remarkable: Jacobs first shows the original short film, then the 100-minute manipulation, and finally the original again — now seen through the viewer’s transformed experience.

Introduction by Julian Ross (Head of Film Programming, Eye)