Jacob’s House, Jacob’s House

Jacob and I met the first day I moved to our block back in 2018. He was carrying a large potted plant and I helped him bring it into the house and we started talking about different types of plants and things like that and sort of clicked. At that point, before any troubles with his landlord, Jacob was often out on the street, sewing, listening to music, so most days I’d pass by and we’d talk or do a little work together. Over the first couple years, we became relatively close and in 2020 when I had problems with my own landlord, Jacob helped me find a new apartment on the same block with his friend. So before Jacob’s housing troubles, he helped me with mine. Over those first years, we sometimes took photographs together and had some film ideas, but it wasn’t until his housing was threatened that we honed in on making a film specifically about his relationship to the house. Once it became clear that the house was going to change we rushed to start filming it as it had been. So yes, the film was born from urgency and began concurrently with our effort to fight Jacob’s eviction, to take his landlord to court for harassment, lack of heat and the rest.

When we began working on the film in 2021, I was the lab manager at the lab and educational center MONO NO AWARE. So, thanks to MONO, shooting on 16mm was more accessible to us than it would have been otherwise, and seemed like the obvious medium to use.

I also felt that we needed film’s ability to create distance, to dislodge the image from time, and to give it a feeling that it could have been shot in 1960 or in 2025. This distance, I think, also removes a level of automatic response on the part of the viewer and its aesthetic opens up a question of what am I watching? When was this made?—reflections that feel very productive to me. This distance felt essential to telling this hyper focused, singular story. So with this temporal freedom, I feel it can be an individual story that still flows through time, tapping into the story’s’ more ‘universal’ qualities, or at least universal to all tenants.

Film also provides a very constructive limit. It was obviously clear that we couldn’t film thousands of feet of film, so even with the lab access of MONO, we still had to be very selective of what we shot. This creates a certain terror. We don’t know what will happen, how long this struggle will go on for, and thereby which event is key to the film and which is less relevant. This then requires, and helped us develop, a sort of rigorous intuition which I think is harder to access when shooting digitally.

Lastly, it felt that our 16mm images stood in total opposition to the landlord’s constant, digital security cameras and her iPhone. She was always filming us, and often filmed us while we were filming, in this weird image loop. The constant, oppressive presence of the digital security cameras came to stand in contrast to our selective, 16mm images; our images didn’t exist in a phone, didn’t exist online, and couldn’t be used as surveillance but only existed on the physical film (or at least until we scanned them). So the medium of film gave us a feeling of ownership, maybe even a control, that felt counter to the surveillance, counter to the oppressive control the landlord was desperately trying to enact.

We also used a lot of our footage as evidence in housing court, making Jacob’s many cases probably the only cases in 40 years to use 16mm evidence!

We started the film right as the new landlord purchased the building and refused to turn on Jacob’s heat. We did an initial 12 hour shoot, photographing the entirety of the building more or less as it was pre-new landlord. Probably a week after that initial day, she began padlocking doors and boarding up hallways and from that moment on the shooting responded to Jacob’s resistance and the landlord’s aggression. Pretty quickly we fell into a rhythm of shooting a sequence and then after developing the film, we’d watch the footage together and record a conversation. I’d ask Jacob to narrate or to respond to the image, to reflect on it, which would ultimately lead to new reflections, and then new images, which would then inform our next shoot. These conversations also formed the voice over that guides us through the film.

It was relatively present from the start. I felt that the house was a central character and that the film had to be grounded in Jacob’s relationship to it, and that in tracing all of its physical transformations, we might then better see Jacob’s own massive resistance and his own more internal journey. However, I didn’t initially think the entire film would take place in the house. Originally, we had planned to try and film court hearings, tenant rallies, and Jacob interacting more with our neighbors, but pretty soon it came to feel that remaining in the house generated a unique balance between the singularity and the totality of the situation.

Landlordism also of course creates isolation, and it needs isolation to carry out its goal of generating private wealth. It needs transient renters who can be easily displaced and replaced with higher paying ones, which is easier when tenants are isolated, unorganized and outside community. So I felt this isolation could be better explored in the extreme of staying in the house. And for anyone who’s dealt with housing insecurity, you know it is all encompassing. It becomes everything in a way. At the same time, even within this isolation the outside world forces itself into the house: the cold seeps in the windows, sirens pour in off the street, the police come, the landlord comes, the neighbors come. The world infiltrates the structure of the house, reminding us that the world, its economic and power structures, creates the conditions of entrapment we are in and that we cannot fully escape. So for me, it was a driving question: in the claustrophobic internality of the house, can we access a larger critique of private property, rental conditions, the police, and all the other things that create a situation that seems isolated, individual, and singular?

Once it was clear the film was rooted in the house I felt grounded in a narrative. We knew the beginning of course, and once it was clear Jacob would be displaced, we knew the film would end with a bare room. So there was a structure to the film guided by the structure of the house. The tricky thing was making room for Jacob’s relationship to more subtle things, like the spirits in the attic for example, while not losing a sense of the biting, material story we were telling. It felt really important that the film contain both my political, material outlook and Jacob’s own rastafarianism, which each pushed for slightly different narratives. I hope, and I think, we found an exciting balance in the end, which we only found through a very long editing process and again the very generative back and forth that Jacob and I developed while recording our reflections and the voice over.