Ken Jacobs, the avant-garde filmmaker known for using found footage and experimental techniques during a career spanning more than 65 years, died Sunday. He was 92. His son, award-winning His Three Daughters filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, told the New York Times that his pioneering father died of kidney failure at a Manhattan hospital.
The elder Jacobs’ cult-film successes include Star Spangled to Death (2004), a mélange of moving images compiled over nearly a half-century; the Structural Experimentation bellwether Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969); and Blonde Cobra, the influential portrait of fellow underground cinema legend Jack Smith, a frequent collaborator who was crucial in Jacobs’ career.
According to the NYT, Jacobs, born in Brooklyn, discovered experimental film through exhibits at the Museum of Modern Art and bought his first camera after a stint in the Coast Guard. He later briefly studied with painter Hans Hofmann, an abstract expressionist.
Jacobs’ first film, per IMDb, was the 1955 short Orchard Street.
His wife and fellow artist Florence Jacobs was also among his closest collaborators, and in 1966 the two with others founded the influential Millennium Film Workshop, a co-op providing new filmmakers access “to the tools, ideas and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios,” according the the organization’s site. Flo, as Florence was known, died in June.
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Among his other endeavors, Jacobs also taught on and off for years at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York beginning in 1969 (then it was called Harpur College), when he first led an experimental film seminar within a course taught by fellow filmmaker Larry Gottheim. It was so popular the school hired him.
He and Gottheim would eventually create the SUNY system’s first Department of Cinema that specialized in avant-garde cinema appreciation and production; Jacobs eventually became a Distinguished Professor Emeritus.
HIs final credited film, 2022’s XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, a full-length collaboration with Flo, continued his later-in-life experiment with 3D-style projection and editing techniques known as Eternalism.
Jacobs is survived by his son Azazel; and daughter Nisi Ariana, an artist and musician.
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