Personal Info
Known For
Directing
Birthdate
1933-05-25
Day of Death
2025-10-05
Place of Birth
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Ken Jacobs
Biography
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.
Filmography (36)
Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
2025
Ken Jacobs - from Orchard Street to the Museum of Modern Art
2023
Art-House America: Austin Film Society
2023
Up the Illusion
2023Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages
2022
Fragments of Paradise
2022
Reminiscences of Jonas Mekas
2016
What Is Cinema?
2013
The Eternal Courtship
2013
Emma's Dilemma
2012
Sleepless Nights Stories
2011
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
2011
Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin
2011
Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
2011
