- Born
- Died
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Ken Jacobs
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.
As director
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Downtown Loft with Skylights
A Date with Shirley
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BMT
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Riverbed
Spasm
Up the Illusion
Whims of Twenty Twenty-Three
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Tourists of the Familiar 1
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Other Urban Lives
From Introduction to Orson Welles’s Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight
Writhing City
For James Otis
Manhattan is an Island
Hobgoblin Ball
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Sergei Eisenstein Embossed
Buster Keaton Embossed
As actor
Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
Art-House America: Austin Film Society
Ken Jacobs - from Orchard Street to the Museum of Modern Art
Up the Illusion
Fragments of Paradise
Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages
Reminiscences of Jonas Mekas
What Is Cinema?
The Eternal Courtship
Emma's Dilemma
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
Sleepless Nights Stories
Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin
Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
Lavender
Santos Dumont: Pré-Cineasta?
Momma's Man
365 Day Project
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Star Spangled to Death
Nervous Ken
Shorts From the Underground
Flo and Ken Jacobs
As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Birth of a Nation
Jonas in the Desert
Quartet Number One
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
Home Movies 1971-81
Lost, Lost, Lost