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.
37 movies
Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
2025·8.3
Ken Jacobs - from Orchard Street to the Museum of Modern Art
2023·0.0
Art-House America: Austin Film Society
2023·0.0
Up the Illusion
2023·0.0
Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages
2022·0.0
Fragments of Paradise
2022·6.5
Reminiscences of Jonas Mekas
2016·0.0
What Is Cinema?
2013·6.5
The Eternal Courtship
2013·0.0
Emma's Dilemma
2012·1.0
Sleepless Nights Stories
2011·5.3
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
2011·6.8
Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin
2011·7.0
Cyclopean 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman
2011·0.0
Santos Dumont: Pré-Cineasta?
2010·5.0
Lavender
2010·0.0
Momma's Man
2008·6.2
365 Day Project
2007·10.0
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
2007·6.6
Star Spangled to Death
2004·7.7
Nervous Ken
2003·0.0
Shorts From the Underground
2002·0.0
Flo and Ken Jacobs
2001·0.0
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
2000·7.7
Birth of a Nation
1997·7.0
Jonas in the Desert
1994·6.4
Quartet Number One
1991·7.5
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
1986·8.4
Home Movies 1971-81
1985·0.0
Lost, Lost, Lost
1976·7.1
Horizons
1973·8.5
Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”
1973·0.0
Huge Pupils
1968·0.0
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1968·7.2
Bill's Hat
1967·0.0
Blonde Cobra
1963·3.0
Scotch Tape
1962·4.4