Filmmaker, Ken Jacobs: This is Ken Jacobs. I'm a filmmaker.
Filmmaker, Azazel Jacobs: My name is Azazel Jacobs, son of Kenneth and Florence Jacobs. My mother began as a painter and then became the main collaborator of my father.
Ken Jacobs: I also studied painting intensively for at least three years, but painting was flat. I needed the illusion of space. Things have to move. And I found that in film.
Narrator: To create the illusion of depth and motion, Jacobs invented a pulsating editing technique that activates flat images. He called these films Eternalisms. Here, he explores a painting by the artist Joan Mitchell.
Azazel Jacobs: For the Joan Mitchell, did you take a picture of it with your camera?
Ken Jacobs: I did. Because it stopped me dead as I was walking through—
Azazel Jacobs: —here at MoMA. And then you manipulated those two frames?
Ken Jacobs: Yes. I take images with my stereo 3D camera, take two pictures at the same time. And I work with two assistants, who understand the computer a lot more than I do. And they were able to put these two pictures together so that a 3D picture appears on screen—deep space. So the Joan Mitchell painting expands and moves in depth. It's very strange and very beautiful, very fascinating to me.
When I talk about Flo and I working with film together, it really was as two painters seeing what was possible in film. We weren't just telling stories. It was really to see things, to see colored space operating, being vital, moving.