Short Works by Ken Jacobs

With Ken Jacobs in person

All films directed by Ken Jacobs.



Disorient Express

1996, 30 mins. A 1906 film of a train ride is dramatically altered through repetition, mirroring, inversion, and directional reversal.

Flo Rounds a Corner

1999, 6 mins. Jacobs’s first work using original video footage.



Surging Sea of Humanity

2006, 11 mins. A stereograph from the 1893 U.S. Centennial Exposition is transformed into “an enormous rugged and craggy 3-D landscape.”

The Day Was a Scorcher

2009, 8 mins. Jacobs uses his own home movie footage from a family trip to Rome. “It’s a perfect day when nothing happens.”

Capitalism: Child Labor

2006, 14 mins. Jacobs digitally animates a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of a nineteenth-century factory floor, crowded with machinery and child workers.

Seeking the Monkey King

2011, 40 mins. An immersive and dazzling work whose vivid gold-blue abstractions are seemingly made from photographed tinfoil, Jacobs’s masterful new work is also a scorching political diatribe about America today.

Free with Museum admission.