The lights of downtown New York dimmed when we lost Ken Jacobs (1933–2025) and Flo Jacobs (1941–2025) last year. To Save and Project presents a special tribute to these giants of independent cinema with the world premiere of Ken Jacobs’s Baud’lairian Capers (1963) in a new MoMA digital restoration, paired with a screening of his favorite Yiddish film, Sidney Goldin’s His Wife’s Lover (1931). J. Hoberman, who introduces the program, writes, “A product of pre-hipster Williamsburg, Ken Jacobs described a mid-1960s show of his work as a selection of ‘Ken Jewishisms.’ One was Baud’lairian Capers, ‘a musical with Nazis and Jews,’ per his description, made five years before The Producers. Its title referring to a Jonas Mekas coinage (‘Baudelairean Cinema’) used to describe Jacobs’s Jack Smith portrait Blonde Cobra (1963), the film was Jacobs’s first without Smith—the ostensive subject was his friend Bob Fleischner, who shot most of Blonde Cobra, typecast as a gentle, somewhat morose, schlemiel although, making her debut, Ken’s bashert [soulmate], Flo Karpf (Jacobs), has nearly as much screen time. Soon after making Baud’lairian Capers, Ken (who was familiar with Yiddish talkies from childhood) and Flo saw ‘the first 100-percent Yiddish singing and talking picture,’ Zayn Waybs Lubovnik (His Wife’s Lover), a comic romance revived for a weekend at the Second Avenue theater that became the Fillmore East. Knocked out by the movie, which presaged elements of his 1968 feature The Sky Socialist, not to mention its star, the brilliant comedian Ludwig Satz, Jacobs used his first paycheck from Binghamton University to purchase a print that decades later would contribute to the National Center for Jewish Film restoration presented here.” On January 29 from 6:15-7pm, Hoberman will sign copies of his new book Everything Is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde.
Baud’lairian Capers. 1963. USA. Directed by Ken Jacobs. World preservation premiere. DCP. 21 min.
Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art with funding from the Celeste Bartos Fund for Film Preservation.
Zayn Vaybs Lubovnik (His Wife’s Lover). 1931. USA. Directed by Sidney M. Goldin. Screenplay by Sheyne Rokhl Simkoff. With Ludwig Satz, Isidore Cashier, Lucy Levin, Lillian Feinman. 35mm. In Yiddish; English subtitles. 80 min.
35mm restoration and new English translation and subtitles by the National Center for Jewish Film with funding from the family of Henry J. Everett in his memory and the National Endowment for the Arts.