Little Snips at Happiness
By David Schwartz
A Date with Shirley
Dir. Ken Jacobs. Photographed by Ken Jacobs, Azazel Jacobs, Nisi Ariana, U.S., no distributor
A Date with Shirley screens Sunday, April 26, at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.
Visiting Ken Jacobs inevitably meant taking a walk to Chinatown with him and Flo, his partner. From their fifth-floor walkup on Chambers Street, you’d head past the phalanx of large, pale government buildings near City Hall, and emerge, as if in The Wizard of Oz, into a burst of color as you entered Columbus Park, a kaleidoscope of ground-level urban energy, with the bustle of people playing Mahjong, Xiangqi, basketball, tai chai, and soccer, and varied music mixing with the squeals of playground children. This was often on the way to a dim sum meal, after popping into stores and making other stops along the way, usually for Ken to capture moments on camera. One outing with Ken, Flo, and my three-year-old son Caleb resulted in an hour-long home movie, and I have a few friends who also possess long videos by Ken starring their children. Archivist Andy Lampert has one with his daughter, Zazie, walking around Chinatown with a handful of dollar bills, getting a lesson from Ken about how money works.
Whether making a home movie or a work of avant-garde cinema—or breaking the boundaries between them—Ken, who died last October, turned daily life into mind-expanding perceptual adventures. It is fitting that his final long-form work is a record of his own haircut in Chinatown by his favorite barber, Shirley, at the V1 Hair Salon on 50 Bayard Street. As she deftly snips away we see Ken, reflected in a mirror, recording the action with equally agile hands. As he did for so many years, he is capturing a quotidian moment so that he can freeze it but then later transform it into a Cubist motion painting. For Shirley, with straightforward vérité footage as the base, he later (with his computer-savvy editing partner Antoine Catala) unlocked the energy latent in the imagery with an array of techniques, using flickering, solarized colors, negative imagery, stroboscopic stutters, and matting that blacks out parts of the frame to focus on vivid details.
A clump of fresh-cut gray hair on the floor is animated. A circular mirror at the base of a barber chair creates distorted abstract images. A cluttered table with hair products, an iPhone stand, and a jar of peanut butter, becomes a fascinating 3D still life. As with so many of the films he made over the past 70 years, his 1950s training under abstract expressionist Hans Hoffman informs his approach, particularly its play with tension between flatness and depth, stillness and motion, and its activation of the entire frame.
But what makes A Date with Shirley especially resonant, and one of his most emotionally rich works, is the family dynamic at its core. Along with Ken for the haircut were his two children—his son, the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, and daughter, multimedia artist Nisi Ariana. Both of them were filming, alongside Ken, and we watch the action from multiple viewpoints—Ken looking, and being looked at—with the mirrors in the salon adding to the complexity of the shifting perspectives. It’s like Velázquez’s Las Meninas in Chinatown. But beyond the visual play is the simple, deeply bittersweet undercurrent that these two adult children are spending precious time with an elderly parent. Ken, who barely says a word, except to acknowledge Shirley’s work as “amazing,” looks glad to be holding a camera, and also wistful; one feels an awareness that he knows these images will outlive him. Azazel and Nisi are both smiling throughout, relishing the rare chance to make a movie together, to honor their father by following in his footsteps. In one shot, we glimpse Azazel from behind, filmed by Nisi, his camera pointed at a green plant by the window; we later cut to Aza’s shot, the plant in the foreground with a dusty window beyond it partly obscuring the view of street traffic beyond, the kind of image that Ken would have filmed. Nisi does most of the talking in the film; she seems to be trying to bring cheerfulness to what feels like a poignant moment. “You’re still handsome, Dad,” she exclaims towards the end of the haircut, a loving compliment that also acknowledges the simple fact of his aging. The entire film is simultaneously suffused with an awareness of time passing and an embrace of the vitality inherent in any present moment.
This duality is present in Ken’s name for the hundreds of short 3D video pieces he created in his last years: Eternalisms. Ken’s art went through many different phases, but he always worked close to home, and he was never more prolific than in his final decade, when he made hundreds of Eternalisms (many available here), shooting and editing until just days before he died. Haircuts are ephemeral, but this one with Shirley lives on. And you can get your own haircut there; the credits include the salon’s phone number, 212-693-3388, and cuts start at eight dollars.