Flo Talks! by Amy Taubin

Flo Jacobs (1941-2025)

To know Flo Jacobs was to love her, and her death in June was, to use a phrase from one of Ken Jacobs’ film titles, a wrenching departure. Flo (born Florence Karpf) will forever be associated with Ken, her life-and-creative partner. (Ken paid tribute to her in another of his titles—Life With a Beautiful Woman.) An excellent artist in her own right, Flo devoted herself in countless ways to Ken’s film work for more than sixty years. Inseparable and interconnected, they created an unparalleled body of work that grew out of, and expanded, the art form that brought them together—painting. Strong-willed, generous, and singular, Flo was the quieter partner, a woman of relatively few words in comparison to the ever-voluble Ken. Her essence was perfectly captured by the great critic Amy Taubin, who wrote “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." This is from Amy’s introduction to “Flo Talks!,” an in-depth and revelatory interview. It’s the best thing I’ve ever read about Flo’s remarkable life, even going back to her childhood in Astoria, where she taught herself to dance by watching Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies on TV. She learned by imitating Fred’s steps—she found him to be the better dancer. The interview is essential reading, so I took the liberty of scanning the interview and posting it here. Flo was more than the Ginger Rogers to his Fred Astaire.

Interview by Amy Taubin, in the excellent book Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford University Press, 2011)