Ken Jacobs
Directing · Born 1933-05-25 · age 92 at death · Williamsburg, 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.
Titles
Blonde Cobra
Scotch Tape
Little Stabs at Happiness
Capitalism: Slavery
Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son
Momma's Man
Star Spangled to Death
Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise
The Georgetown Loop
60 Seconds of Solitude in Year Zero
Horizons
Seeking the Monkey King
Flo Rounds a Corner
Window
Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World
Canopy
Quartet Number One
New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903
Capitalism: Child Labor
Orchard Street
Two Wrenching Departures
Windbreaker
Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days
Perfect Film
The Guests
Mountaineer Spinning
Keaton's Cops
Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896
Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)
The Death of P'town
Globe
The Discovery
For Life, Against the War
Circling Zero: Part One, We See Absence
Chronometer
Changing Azazel
Titles
Rain Clouds
Turbulent Waters
Home Movies 1971-81
Bill's Hat
Reminiscences of Jonas Mekas
Nervous Ken
The Eternal Courtship
Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”
Up the Illusion
Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
A Loft
Double Wow
Urban Peasants
Joys of Waiting for the Broadway Bus #2
Abstract Eternalism
Cartoon
Cartoonish 1-10
XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX
Spasm
Sergei Eisenstein Embossed
Chaos Is Order Misunderstood
Buster Keaton Embossed
A Small Misunderstanding