Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son + Introduction by Mark Webber
Open City Documentary Festival
Thu 12 Mar 2026, 18:30
Barbican Cinema 2
Ken Jacobs’ 1969 structural film classic created from found footage, including the 1905 original, is a masterful investigation of perception itself.
As a prologue to the retrospective Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs, this film includes the 1905 original from Billy Bitzer (D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer).
One of the 3,000 movies made between 1896 and 1912 it only exists today because it was deposited at the Library of Congress as a paper print.
Through various filmic manipulations, Jacobs transformed this 10-minute film into a two-hour study of filmmaking, vision and composition.
Here Tom, Tom, the Pipers Son (1905) “is most reverently examined” and becomes central to this masterpiece of found footage cinema and represents a turning point in Jacobs’ film work, refocusing his attention to investigating perception itself.
With an introduction by Mark Webber (The Visible Press).
Full details: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/tom-tom-the-pipers-son-introduction
Part of Barbican's ongoing series Experiments in Film.
Mark Webber is an independent curator of artists’ film and video who has been responsible for screenings and events at institutions including Tate Modern, National Film Theatre, ICA, Barbican Centre and Raven Row (London), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Kunsthalle Basel, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne), the Brisbane, Rotterdam and Oberhausen film festivals and many other international museums, art centres and festivals.
