Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)
Ken Jacobs, a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema, has passed away at the age of 92. Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Jacobs began as a painter, studying with Abstract Expressionist master Hans Hofmann before turning to film in the mid-1950s. Around the same time, he met Jack Smith, with whom he would form one of the most vital collaborations in underground film history. Together they worked on Star Spangled to Death, Jacobs’s sprawling, decades-in-the-making critique of American society, as well as Little Stabs at Happiness (1960) and Blonde Cobra (1963), a portrait of Smith that Jonas Mekas famously anointed “the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema.” Re-editing 16mm footage from a film by Bob Fleischner, Jacobs created a bricolage of queer iconography, Hollywood detritus, and improvised performance. His Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) remains a landmark of experimental cinema, a radical deconstruction of early film that set the course for his later work.
With his wife and lifelong collaborator, Florence (“Flo”) Jacobs, he founded the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966, a cooperative space that offered equipment, screenings and education to aspiring filmmakers – a democratic alternative to commercial cinema’s gatekeeping. In 1969, Jacobs co-founded, with Larry Gottheim, one of the first university film departments in the United States at Binghamton University, where he taught for decades and mentored generations of filmmakers and artists, including Phil Solomon, Mark LaPore, Jim Hoberman, and Art Spiegelman.
Jacobs was deeply invested in breaking through film’s flat, two-dimensional surface and enthusiastically embraced digital filmmaking in the late 1990s. In the mid-1970s, he and Flo developed a dual-projector setup called the Nervous Magic Lantern, and in 2006 he patented a stroboscopic-inspired editing technique, “eternalism,” designed to create a sense of depth in moving images. Through his website and his X account, which both feature a bio reading “looking forward to a world without money,” he remained one of the most prolific figures in American avant-garde cinema. Over seven decades, Jacobs’s work was celebrated in retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of the Moving Image, and institutions across Europe and Japan.
