Ken Jacobs, the pioneering experimental filmmaker noted for incorporating manipulated found footage into a series of films over more than seven decades, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 92.
His son, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, noted that Ken’s wife Flo Jacobs had died on June 4: “While the official cause of death was from kidney failure, life without his collaborator and partner since 1960 was unimaginable for so many, especially him.
“He worked on his art every day, completing some final ‘eternalisms’ on the day he went to the hospital,” Azazel Jacobs continued.
Film at Lincoln Center called him “the titan of American experimental cinema.”
Born in Brooklyn, Ken Jacobs got his start in New York’s downtown art scene during the 1960s during the era of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg. After studying painting with Hans Hoffman, he moved into filmmaking. He collaborated with his friend Jack Smith on the notable underground films “Blonde Cobra” and “Little Stabs at Happiness.”
Flo and Ken Jacobs
Courtesy Azazel Jacobs
Jacobs and his late wife Flo founded Millennium Film Workshop in 1966. Ken Jacobs taught in the cinema department of Binghamton University in New York for over three decades.
In 1956, he made his first film “Orchard Street” about the Lower East Side, and many of his later films also “used Manhattan streets, rooftops and dumps as the backdrop for sardonic minidramas of social despair,” his former student, film critic J. Hoberman, wrote in 2013.
His 1969 film “Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son” uses a short film from 1905 as source material to manipulate speed, light and motion. It was admitted to the National Film Registry in 2007. Jacobs explained the film saying, “There’s already so much film. Let’s draw some of it out for a deeper look, toy with it, take it into a new light with inventive and expressive projection. Freud would suggest doing so as a way to look into our minds.”
His later films include 1986’s “Perfect Film” and 1990’s “Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896.” In 2004, he released “Star Spangled to Death,” a nearly seven-hour compendium of found footage on 20th century American history that he began compiling in 1957.
Jacobs’ films, videos and performances have been exhibited at venues including the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Museum of Modern Art.
His honors include the AFI’s Maya Deren Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, artist Nisi Ariana.