Ken Jacobs, a leading experimental filmmaker who influenced both cinema and art in equal measure, died in New York on Sunday at 92. The New York Times reported that his son, the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, said he died of kidney failure.
Alongside Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas, Jacobs was one of the key filmmakers associated with the underground scene of New York during the postwar era. He pushed at the limits of what a film could be, showing that it need not only exist as images projected onto a screen.
Blonde Cobra (1963), one of his breakout successes, initially called for a radio to be played live while the film was projected in certain parts. It was a short that starred Smith and contained no obvious plot. In Jacobs’s words, it was “a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust.” With its depictions of necrophilia and references to sexuality involving children, the short courted controversy, but it also influenced other filmmakers to dispense with narrative.
That work is now considered a classic, along with Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969), in which a portion of a D.W. Griffith film is slowed down, stilled, looped, and ultimately presented in its existing form. The act of altering the Griffith clip over and over was something of a performance in its own right, as the scholar P. Adams Sitney once pointed out. It’s now considered an iconic work of a style known as structuralism, in which filmmakers use techniques such as repetition and flickering to call attention to aspects of their medium.
While Jacobs is core to experimental film history, his work has perhaps remained on the fringes of 1960s art history, even though he frequently drew comparisons between his films and painting. He studied that latter medium with Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist artist, and he even termed his filmic work “Abstract Expressionist cinema.”
At times, he even made that label literal. In 2018, as part of his “Eternalisms” series, he made a film in which he trained his lens on Joan Mitchell’s abstractions, utilizing a stereo 3D camera to cause them to appear to pulse.
Referring to his wife and longtime collaborator, Florence, Jacobs once said, “When I talk about Flo and I working with film together, it really was as two painters seeing what was possible in film. We weren’t just telling stories. It was really to see things, to see colored space operating, being vital, moving.”
Ken Jacobs was born in 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, an artist and writer, died when he 7; his father was a former minor league baseball player. Because he attended a high school that offered free tickets to the Museum of Modern Art, he frequently visited that museum as a teenager and gained a film education through the various screenings put on there. He spent two years in the Coast Guard Reserve after failing to achieve conscientious objector status during the war between the US and Korea.
Having studied with Hofmann during the ’50s, he took up film, he said, because painting was regarded as flat and he “needed both eyes to function” as a human being in search of depth, as he once told MoMA. His first film, from 1955, was Orchard Street, which features footage of a “very Jewish street” that had been transformed by World War II.
Over the past few years, Jacobs’s films have been featured widely in New York museums. In 2023, the NYU-run space 80WSE featured his films in its storefront space alongside his rarely seen drawings. That same year, MoMA acquired 212 of his works, calling him “one of the great moving-image artists of the 20th and 21st centuries” in its announcement.
His work is currently on view at the Whitney Museum in “Sixties Surreal,” which features his 1960 film Little Stabs at Happiness, in which Jack Smith can be seen leaping in and out of a bathtub.
Throughout his career, Jacobs asserted that his work was not merely absurd or surreal but also obliquely political, a sensibility most obvious in his seven-hour film, Star-Spangled to Death, which he began in 1956 and which acts as a recent history of protest in the US. He knew, however, that others did not necessarily see his work that way. “I admire the people who are devoting their time to resistance right now,” Jacobs told the Brooklyn Rail. “But I work at my abstractions.”
