Ken Jacobs, a leading experimental filmmaker who influenced cinema and art alike, died Sunday in New York. new york times Reports say his son, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, said he died of kidney failure.
Along with Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas, Jacobs was one of the major filmmakers associated with New York’s underground scene in the postwar era. He pushed the limits of what cinema could be, showing that it didn’t just need to exist as images were projected onto a screen.
Blonde cobra (1963), one of his breakthrough successes, initially required live broadcasts in certain locations where the film was projected. Smith appears briefly, with no apparent plot. In Jacobs’ words, it was “a look at the explosion of life, of an imaginative man who suffered pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and was consumed by the disgust of America’s 1950s, ’40s, ’30s, ’30s.” With its depictions of the undead and references to sexual acts involving children, it was a brief controversy, but it also influenced other filmmakers to smooth out the narrative.
This work is now considered a classic Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), in which portions of Griffith’s film are slowed down, stopped, looped and ultimately presented in their current form. As scholar P. Adams Sitney once pointed out, the act of changing the Griffith cut is itself a performance. Now considered an iconic work, its style is known as structuralism, in which the filmmakers used techniques such as repetition and flicker to draw attention to aspects of the medium.
Although Jacobs is central to the history of experimental film, his work may have remained on the fringes of art history in the 1960s, despite the frequent comparisons he drew between film and painting. He studied the latter medium with the Abstract Expressionist artist Hans Hofmann, going so far as to call his film work “Abstract Expressionist cinema.”
Sometimes, he even coined the label’s literal meaning. In 2018, as part of his “Eternalism” series, he made a film in which he used Joan Mitchell’s abstract training footage and utilized stereo 3D cameras to make them appear to pulsate.
Jacobs, referring to his wife and long-time collaborator Florence, once said, “When I talk about Flo and me using film together, it’s really two painters seeing what’s possible in film. We’re not just telling stories. Seeing things, seeing colored space, colored space in action, is kind of clever and moving.”
Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. His mother, an artist and writer, died when he was 7 years old. His father is a former minor league baseball player. Because he attended a high school that offered free admission to the Museum of Modern Art, he frequently visited the museum and gained a film education through various screenings there. Failing to reach serious opposition status during the war between the United States and Korea, he spent two years in the Coast Guard Reserves.
He said that after studying with Hofmann in the 1950s, he made the film because painting was considered flat and he “needed the eyes to function” as a human being, to find depth, as he once told MOMA. His first film in 1955 was Orchard Streetwhich includes footage of a “very Jewish street” from World War II.
Over the past few years, Jacobs’ films have been widely exhibited in New York museums. In 2023, the NYU-run 80wse featured his films, as well as his lesser-known paintings, in a storefront space. That same year, Moma acquired 212 of his works, calling him “one of the greatest moving images of the 20th and 21st centuries.”
His work is currently on display at the Whitney Museum happy little thornJack Smith can be seen jumping in from the bathtub.
Jacobs has asserted throughout his career that his work is not just absurd or surreal but also slantedly political, and it’s the most overt sensibility in his seven-hour film. Stars spinning to deathHe started in 1956, the most recent history of protest in the United States. However, he knows others won’t necessarily see his work this way. “I admire the people that they’re putting in the time to resist right now,” Jacobs told Jacobs. Brooklyn Railroad. “But I work in abstraction.”
