SATURDAY, APRIL 18 – 7:00PM (w/ introduction by James Otis)

This April, Spectacle is privileged to participate in THE WHOLE SHEBANG: CELEBRATING KEN AND FLO JACOBS, a month-long fourteen-venue tribute to the two most inseparable and essential heroes of avant-garde film. The couple’s legacy of adroit optical distortion and critical recycling of commercial entertainment –not to mention their role in paving the stone’s of New York’s enduring network of experimental film exhibition and distribution– has made them a guiding constellation for some of the predilections and programming practices of past and present volunteer members of our micro-cinema.

While Spectacle has yet to have screened a Jacobs work, we have dedicated programs to filmmakers who were close friends, correspondents, and collaborators of theirs over the years. Fortuitously, we are thrilled to once again host Colorado-based weirdo art film luminary James Otis, who will introduce this celebratory screening and speak to his own memories and friendship with Ken and Flo Jacobs.

The main piece of the evening is TWO WRENCHING DEPARTURES, an under-seen and moving digital adaptation of a 1989 nervous system tribute performance made in the immediate wake of the deaths, only days apart, of Jacobs collaborators Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner. The footage of the artists is made into a flickering frolic through the Lower East Side, set to the soundtrack of the Ramon Navarro vehicle THE BARBARIAN (Sam Wood, 1933). These images also made their way into Ken Jacobs’ epic six-hour STAR SPANGLED TO DEATH (2004), an anti-patriotic omnibus that also includes James Otis’ ON YOUR OWN, the gut busting found footage opener of Spectacle’s 2025 Otis retrospective.

ON YOUR OWN will precede the feature presentation, as well as FOR JAMES OTIS, a Ken Jacobs eternalism made from one of Otis’ many dazzling iPhone panoramas.