Soft Rain

“In Ken Jacobs’ Soft Rain (1969), a camera “stares” out of a window onto a street for about nine minutes (actually, a three-minute segment repeated three times); nothing is staged; there is no editing, no camera movement; reality flows by, Zen-like, and is recorded. The image is mostly still, except for a few cars and pedestrians; these become events. There is no aesthetic reason for the film to last nine minutes instead of ninety; its “form” is the unstructured matrix of reality.” – Amos Vogel