P. Adams Sitney, Flo Jacobs, and the Avant-garde
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When Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs was published in the summer of 2011, Artforum turned to P. Adams Sitney for a full assessment of what was then and certainly remains a “profoundly influential career.” Sitney proceeded to walk readers through what he perceived to be three phases of “Jacobs’s extraordinary artistic production,” occasionally nodding to Optic Antics, the “splendid book” edited by Michele Pierson, David E. James, and Paul Arthur, and to Jacobs’s wife and collaborator with whom he’d been making films since the 1950s. Sitney noted that the book features “a lengthy, illuminating interview with Flo Jacobs by Amy Taubin (drolly titled ‘Flo Talks!’).” Within the past few days, we have lost both Sitney, who was eighty, and Flo Jacobs, who was eighty-four.
“In a field dominated by academic pedants, Sitney is a rarity,” wrote Brian L. Frye at the top of his interview for the Brooklyn Rail in 2005. “An art critic of the old school, cheerfully dismissive of scholarly fads and preoccupations.” For decades, Visionary Film, Sitney’s 1974 history of postwar American avant-garde cinema, was an essential resource, and Frye asked him about its staying power. In short, Sitney explained, it was useful. In a time before the internet, before home video, the descriptions and analyses collected in Visionary Film were “particularly valuable to people who wanted to remember what they had seen.”
Sitney grew up in a university town—New Haven, Connecticut—and when he was around fourteen, he wandered into a screening that set the course for the rest of his life. “And for a certain kind of pretentious art-oriented adolescent, [Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s] Un chien andalou [1929] was the perfect film!” he told Frye. “I was hooked!” He founded a film society and published a newsletter, Filmwise, and in the 1960s, he toured Europe and traveled to Buenos Aires with programs of experimental films, screening and watching them again and again, taking notes, and gathering documentation.
While Visionary Film broke avant-garde cinema down into genres and subgenres, Sitney’s 2008 book Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson devoted its chapters to individual artists. “Sitney argues that American art is fundamentally Emersonian, primarily because American artists assume that art necessarily expresses social experience,” wrote Frye for Cineaste in 2009. “Eyes Upside Down explores Emersonian themes in the work of eleven avant-garde filmmakers—Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Hollis Frampton, Robert Beavers, Andrew Noren, Ernie Gehr, Warren Sonbert, Abigail Child, and Su Friedrich. It’s an eclectic and rather surprising set of examples. If Stan Brakhage and Abigail Child are both Emersonians, Sitney’s theory really has legs.”
Besides the books and the years spent teaching at Princeton and other universities, another of Sitney’s lasting contributions is the cofounding of Anthology Film Archives and his role in shaping its mission. In 1969, he, Mekas, Brakhage, and filmmakers Jerome Hill and Peter Kubelka drew up plans for a museum, library, and screening space. With poet and filmmaker James Broughton and playwright and film theorist Ken Kelman, they formed a selection committee to establish the Essential Cinema Repertory, which Anthology itself calls “an ambitious attempt to define the art of cinema.”
Anthology has championed Ken Jacobs for decades, and in 2016, the programmers noted that his “body of work stands as one of the richest and most ceaselessly evolving in the history of experimental cinema. That Flo Jacobs has played a vital role in forming this body of work is well-known.” The occasion was Ken Jacobs & Family, a series of three programs spotlighting work by Ken and Flo and their children, Nisi and Azazel Jacobs.
Azazel, whose His Three Daughters (2023) picked up Gotham and Film Independent Spirit Awards, cast his parents in Momma’s Man—and shot the 2008 feature in their apartment, which Manohla Dargis described in the New York Times as “a revelation, an impossibly crowded storeroom of books, audio and motion picture paraphernalia, Mexican masks, antique toys, family photographs, and bursts of colorful art.” Ken and Flo Jacobs “were nervous about the situation, definitely my mom,” Azazel told Nick Dawson in Filmmaker. “For my dad it was an easy thing, he’s playing a really solid, certain thing and there’s not many lines, but my mom had to do a different type of acting.”
David Schwartz, who will spotlight Anthology and sixteen other New York venues in the forthcoming series he’s curated for the Museum of Modern Art (A Theater Near You, Thursday through July 11), notes that Flo Jacobs was “a terrific painter,” and he pulls a quote from Amy Taubin’s introduction to the interview included in Optic Antics: “The dominant quality she projects—in her facial expressions and body language, and through the timbre of her voice and inflections of her speech—is concern. For the most part, she speaks softly, but she’s quick to laugh when something strikes her as absurd and to turn fierce when confronted with injustice.”
“When I talk about Flo and I working with film together,” Ken Jacobs told MoMA’s Magazine last summer, “it really was as two painters seeing what was possible in showing film in unexpected ways and finding unexpected things happening. We weren’t just telling stories, movies with one shot, next shot, each shot hitting off the other one and making it tell a further element of the story. It was really to see things, to see colored space operating, being vital, moving.”
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