Ken Jacobs

Known for DirectingBorn 1933-05-25Died 2025-10-05Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, USA

A pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s, Ken Jacobs is a central figure in post-war experimental cinema. From his first films of the late 1950s to his recent experiments with digital video, his investigations and innovations have influenced countless artists. A New Yorker by birth, Jacobs graduated from City University to find himself in the midst of the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which included artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and the experimental theater troupes of Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Although Jacobs had studied painting with Hans Hoffman, he quickly gravitated to film, finding kindred spirits in radical filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton. An early friendship with Jack Smith yielded several collaborations, including the seminal underground films Blonde Cobra (which Jonas Mekas dubbed "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema") and Little Stabs at Happiness, as well as a Provincetown beach-based live show, The Human Wreckage Review.Read more

Movies & web series

365 Day Project

The Death of P'town

Circling Zero: Part One, We See Absence

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

Horizons

Changing Azazel

Windbreaker

Star Spangled to Death

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Quartet Number One

The Georgetown Loop

Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin

Birth of a Nation

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film

Keaton's Cops

Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896

Lost, Lost, Lost

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Fragments of Paradise

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis

What Is Cinema?

Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days

The Discovery

Orchard Street

Jonas in the Desert

Momma's Man

Rain Clouds

The Guests

New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903

Capitalism: Child Labor

Mountaineer Spinning

Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise

Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son

Chronometer

Perfect Film

Globe

For Life, Against the War

Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)

Little Stabs at Happiness

Sleepless Nights Stories

Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World

Canopy

Santos Dumont: Pré-Cineasta?

Two Wrenching Departures

Flo Rounds a Corner

Capitalism: Slavery

Seeking the Monkey King