Remembering Filmmaker, Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)

This past Sunday, the New York pioneering experimental filmmaker, Ken Jacobs, passed away at the age of 92. The loss of Ken Jacobs not only means that cinema has lost one of its great artists, but also one of its most active. Two years ago, I had the fortune of taking a course on experimental cinema with the great Amy Taubin, where I was first introduced to Ken Jacobs’ work. In her introduction, she commented that she would receive an email from Jacobs weekly with an array of films he had been working on. A filmmaker constantly working, constantly creating, so much so that in 2020 alone he released fifty films. His work ethic shows throughout his work, an artist striving to create and represent his worldview consistently, for the cinema was his most essential expression of thought.

My first experience with Jacobs was a collection of his early shorts titled The Whirled. The four shorts that make up this collection consist of two odes to silent cinema shot in the late-50’s in New York City, a re-editing of a television game show starring Jacobs, and the remnants of a film never completed titled The Death of P’Town. Jacob’s immediate worldview is clear, that life like art is about the purest form of expression. Jacobs in his early cinema found a muse in performance artist, Jack Smith (director of Flaming Creatures). Jacobs and Smith were excited by the street theater of New York, deciding they should begin filming it for themselves. What made these early films so strong is collaboration based on pure excitement. As Jacobs said of Jack Smith in the Metrograph Journal, “Jack was defiantly wild, okay? There’s nothing I could imagine that he wouldn’t do on-screen...” Smith commanded you to watch him and not look away, reminiscent of the silent era comedians but closer in reference to the later Divine. Jacobs in the early work not only finds beauty in the mundane, but declares that to live is to express one’s body and mind as open and honest as it will allow.

The Whirled is a miraculous artistic expression, not only for its performance art but as a work of blending sound and image. Jacobs in the third segment, TV Plug, delays the audio half a minute to create an emotional resonance out of the viewer, climaxing in a news bulletin interrupting Jacobs from commenting on the more critical side of his films, the more political side that was hidden from the television viewers. This experimenting with sound would show up in Blonde Cobra, where Jacobs encourages the viewer to watch the film played over the radio, signaling queues when to lower and raise the volume. It becomes then not just a viewing experience, but an emotional interactive experience. The interactive emotionality is what I have found strongest in his work, like in Little Stabs at Happiness, another collection of short films from the early-60’s. Some of these shorts are performances by Jack Smith, some are street photography, some are video diaries of his life. The first scene is a playhouse performance by Jack Smith, taking child-like whimsy and obstructing it with adult sensibilities. Smith’s performance is free, and Jacob’s camera remains tight on Smith’s face and body. We then learn, however, through an audio tape reflecting on the previous chapter, that Jacobs and Smith have had a falling out and have cut off communication. This leads to the most striking scene in the film for me, where Jacobs records his friends on a rooftop running around; nothing more than the joy of life. Loves go, friends go, but the joy remains. As often life changes, the overall beauties of life remain constant.

Jacobs would further adapt his cinema like this, moving away from performance films and diary films, to more politically charged essays on cinema. Films like The Sky Socialist and Star Spangled to Death, which he spent years creating, use archival and recorded footage to comment on the racism industry in America, capitalists profiting on the suffering of citizens before and after slavery. Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son would lead to Jacobs developing a newer voice in his work, playing with the medium of celluloid film; recutting, rearranging, and reworking a 1905 Biograph short of the same name. Of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, Manohla Dargis said in her New York Times obituary of Ken Jacobs, “My younger self was too habituated to mainstream cinema to make sense of Jacobs’s movie. It seemed overly opaque, confusing. What I didn’t understand about “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” at that point was that Jacobs was inviting me to see the 1905 movie — and, by extension, cinema itself — with newly opened eyes.”

Perhaps the most staggering experience with Jacobs’ work came with the 80WSE Gallery Installation titled Ken Jacobs: Up the Illusion. The exhibition was on the corner of 10th and Broadway in Manhattan, and for its six month run you could walk by the gallery windows and watch Ken Jacobs films twenty-four hours a day. In the 21st century, Jacobs developed and mastered a strobe technique that he called “Eternalism”, taking two camera shots, cutting back and forth between them (one of which is usually in camera negative) to create the illusion of motion. Jacobs was carrying on his original dissection of cinema, this time with what it means to create the illusion of movement. If I found myself in the Union Square area, I would always stop by to see these virtuosic films. Often I was so moved that people walking by would wonder why I was paralyzed staring at a strobe, but when you’re bearing witness to the artistry behind Capitalism: Child Labor or Once Upon a Planet, I’d challenge any viewer fascinated by the deconstruction of cinema to look away.

It would be impossible to talk about Ken Jacobs without mentioning his life partner, Flo Jacobs. They were inseparable in their lives, creating their art together and raising two children, including director Azazel Jacobs (His Three Daughters). Flo passed on during the summer, and now Ken is with her again. In 2025, many of the great experimental New York artists died, including playwright Richard Foreman and writer P. Adams Sitney. Ken Jacobs’ role in the New York underground should not go undervalued or unseen. He was one of the most unique and essential voices. To watch Ken Jacobs’ cinema is to hear the wind blow through the trees. To understand the cinema of Ken Jacobs is to understand life.