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Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)
Matt Boren, Flo Jacobs and Ken Jacobs in Momma's Man (courtesy of Kino Lorber) Ken Jacobs wasn’t just a single (albeit huge) formative force in experimental film, but a river through which an array of streams flowed to their own artistic destinations. For New Yorkers, the Williamsburg native was an easily-sighted local legend: The first time I remember seeing him speak was in 2019 at a MoMI memorial screening of work by Phil Solomon, one of his many notable students at SUNY-Binghamton. Jacobs was in full stentorian mode, taking to the stage to proclaim, by way of sorrowful introduction, that “a teacher should not outlive his students.” Later that year, he was in the front row of Anthology Film Archives’s small downstairs auditorium as Nathaniel Dorsky presented his rarely-screened 2016 Ossuary. Evidently nervous, Dorsky asked Jacobs if he liked the film. “Very much,” he purred to a visibly relieved Dorsky, who noted that Jacobs had often been unkind to his work in the past. It was one of those moments where a portal into decades of experimental film history (division of grudges whispered about after-hours) unexpectedly becomes visible, and exactly the kind of moment Jacobs regularly conjured by virtue of the gravitas accrued through persistence, stamina and, yes, the films and performances themselves.
Writing in 2021 for a Kino Lorber collection of Jacobs’ films, his former student/projectionist and longtime friend J. Hoberman identifies the equally formative importance of both socialism and the spatial theories of painter Hans Hofmann. Hoberman summarizes these as, “simply put, the idea that space has volume and that although painting is two-dimensional, reality is three […] Hofmann’s notion of ‘plastic creation’ arising from ‘the varied counterplay of push and pull,’ flatness and depth, still inform Ken’s work.” That impulse increasingly placed Jacobs’ work near 3D using devices like, among other things, his self-designed “Nervous System” apparatus, which Hoberman describes in that essay as running “identical footage, slightly out of phrase, inch by inch through a pair of projectors fronted by a large, propeller-like shutter, [which] produced a form of depth—what Ken termed ‘eternalism’—through the rapid alternation of similar frames, as well as a barrage of regimented light and increasing optical violence.”
His initial short films were more firmly in the early-’60s underground film lineage of flamboyant performances and downtown boho camp, beginning with works starring fellow filmmaker Jack Smith. “Jack Smith was trying too hard the very first time we met,” Jacobs told another former student, R. Emmet Sweeney (who ended up producing that Lorber collection). “I wasn’t taken by him.” But the two went on to make films like an early version of Star-Spangled to Death, the 440-minute feature originally “meant to test human tolerance,” as Jacobs said of an initial incarnation of a work begun in the ’50s and ultimately completed and premiered in 2004. That title was (as Parker Tyler wrote in 1969’s Underground Film: A Critical History) “a grimly poetic camp phrase expressing the anti patriotic radical socialism which, Jacobs believes, was the true impetus of the emergent Underground as distinct from the elder avant-garde,” a political impulse that remained perpetually present in Jacobs’s work.
Jacobs entered his second, more career-defining phase as his method shifted from creating images from scratch to deranging various archives into new visual states. That’s the tactic behind his signature title, 1969’s Tom Tom, The Piper’s Son, an exhaustive examination of a slowed-down Billy Bitzer short from 1905 transfigured through projection and re-photographed at various speeds and magnification levels, methods Jacobs’s work would proceed to expand upon exhaustively. Later in his career, Jacobs was also in the habit of producing flickering .gifs and posting them to Twitter—casually overwhelming images disrupting the timeline in the best way possible.
Alongside the films, it’s his legacy as a teacher that keeps popping to the front of my mind. Jacobs’s back catalogue includes the romantically titled 1970 short Binghamton, My India, which gives an idea of his attachment to the place, and besides those named above, the list of his students there includes Tomonori Nishikawa, who passed away earlier this year (“92 next month but old age loses its charm when I hear news like this. Tomonari was always young!,” Jacobs wrote at the time), and Art Spiegelman, whose initial conception for Maus came after watching cartoons in Jacobs’ class in 1971. Paying tribute to Jacobs in 2008, Spiegelman described Jacobs as “my mentor and irascible best friend for over 30 years (we stopped speaking in 2001).”
About that irascibility: a 1970 newspaper clipping from the college newspaper, The Colonial News, hung in his office in Binghamton long after his departure. The headline would be enough to make any filmmaker blush with pride—“LOCAL GROUP SEEKS FIRING OF COLLEGE PROF”—while the article details the efforts of Broome County residents making up the euphemistically-named Committee for a University Return to Education (CURE) to have Jacobs fired for screening 1969’s Nisi Ariana Window, which they considered “a pornographic film.” The cultural conservatives also objected to, among other things, Jacobs teaching a class on underground comics, and said they would call for the cinema department to be entirely cut as “a last resort. We don’t object to the Cinema Department itself. It should be there, but Jacobs should not. […] We’d hate to have to do this in that a lot of innocent people would be hurt. The department, however, could always start up again in a year or two without Jacobs.” Having been arrested for showing Flaming Creatures back in 1964 under obscenity charges, Jacobs was unphased by CURE’s mafioso-like threats, knowing they didn’t have just cause for termination and perceiving his symbolic role as their nemesis: “I’m useful to them. They feel that if they get rid of me, they get rid of ‘evil’ in the world.” He prevailed; they didn’t.
Jacobs’s legacy extends to a surprising number of my friends; it seems he was benevolently arranging my social life decades in advance. That brings me back to Sweeney, who writes in an email:
I went to undergrad at SUNY Binghamton from 1999-2003, and Ken was winding down his time there. I think he was fully retired by the time I graduated. I took one full class with him with under the broad heading of “Stupidity.” He was like a stand-up comedian at this point, just riffing on shit that annoyed him; it was very entertaining and unlike anything I had experienced in a classroom. The main takeaway was to question everything, including him.
Having lost his partner Flo earlier this year (to his left on the bed in 2008’s Momma’s Man, seen above), Jacobs is survived by two children, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (the director of Momma’s Man) and artist Nisi Ariana (who gave her name to the film title kicking off that 1970 campus kerfuffle).
