Ken Jacobs, a pioneering experimental filmmaker known for incorporating manipulated found footage into a series of films for more than 70 years, passed away Sunday in Manhattan. He was 92 years old.
His son, film director Azazel Jacobs, pointed out that Ken’s wife, Flo Jacobs, passed away on June 4th, saying, “The official cause of death was kidney failure, but his life without collaborators or partners since 1960 has been hard to imagine for many, especially for him.
“He worked on his art every day and completed some final ‘eternalism’ on the day he went to the hospital,” continued Azazel Jacobs.
The Lincoln Center film industry called him the “titan of American experimental cinema.”
Brooklyn-born Ken Jacobs began his career in the downtown New York art scene in the 1960s, during the era of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg. After studying painting from Hans Hoffmann, he went on to the world of filmmaking. He collaborated with his friend Jack Smith on the well-known underground films Blonde Cobra and Little Stub at Happiness.
Flo and Ken Jacobs
Provided by Azazel Jacobs
Jacobs and his late wife, Flo, founded the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966. Ken Jacobs taught in the Film Department at Binghamton University in New York for more than 30 years.
In 1956 he produced Orchard Street, his first film about the Lower East Side, and many of his subsequent films also “used Manhattan streets, rooftops and garbage dumps as the backdrop of a sarcastic mini-drama about social despair,” former student and film critic J. Hoverman wrote in 2013.
His 1969 film, Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, uses a 1905 short film as source material to manipulate speed, light and movement. The film was registered on the National Film Registry in 2007. Jacobs explained the film as follows: “We already have a lot of films. Let’s draw out some of them to see deeper, mess with them, and shed new light with inventive and expressive projections. Freud will suggest doing so as a way to look at our minds.”
His subsequent films include 1986’s Perfect Film and 1990’s The Opening of the 19th Century: 1896. In 2004 he released Star Spangled to Death, a collection of found footage on 20th century American history, which he began editing in 1957, in about seven hours.
Jacobs’ films, videos and performances are on display at venues such as the Berlin Film Festival, London Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and the Museum of Modern Art.
His honors include grants from the AFI Maya Dellen Award, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, National Fund for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council of Arts.
In addition to his son, he is survived by a daughter, artist Nishi Ariana.
