A ghostly tightrope walker treading an invisible line above the madding crowd.
People responding on camera to the assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom.
Gargantuan rain clouds sputtering in and out of color above roiling seas.
These are just a few of the unforgettable images conjured over more than 65 years by Ken Jacobs, the pioneering filmmaker whose experiments with cinematic form led many to consider him the éminence grise of the American avant-garde.
He died, at 92, on Sunday at a hospital in Manhattan. His son, the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, said the cause was kidney failure.
Mr. Jacobs began to tinker seriously with filmmaking in 1955, but it was the following year that two experiences helped cement his lifelong dedication to the moving image and his obsession with its plasticity.
He began studying with Hans Hofmann, the German-born artist and influential teacher, who offered free painting classes in New York City. Though he wasn’t in Hofmann’s class for long, the painter’s work left an imprint on Mr. Jacobs, who would later describe his filmmaking as “Abstract Expressionist cinema” in homage.
It was also in 1956 that Mr. Jacobs met Jack Smith, another key figure in the early days of American underground cinema. The two soon began work on a variety of projects, including Mr. Jacobs’s sprawling critique of American society, “Star Spangled to Death,” a decades-in-the-making epic that was released in 2004; Mr. Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” (1963), another cult success; and “Blonde Cobra” (1959-63), a portrait of Mr. Smith and one of the most influential and popular experimental films ever made.
Mr. Jacobs would poetically describe “Blonde Cobra” as “a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, 40s, 30s disgust.” Mr. Smith plays the man, among several other roles.
Re-editing 16-millimeter footage from an abandoned film by his friend the cinematographer Bob Fleischner, Mr. Jacobs wove an eye-catching bricolage of outré sexual imagery, classic Hollywood references and queer iconography. Jonas Mekas, a pre-eminent champion of avant-garde film, anointed “Blonde Cobra” “the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema.”
It was followed by “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” (1969), the apotheosis of Mr. Jacobs’s work with found footage and a vital part of a wave of so-called Structural experimentation in American cinema in the 1960s, a movement that included artists such as Bruce Conner, Hollis Frampton and Peter Kubelka.
In “Tom, Tom,” Mr. Jacobs rephotographed a salvaged 1905 short film based on an old folk rhyme directed by D.W. Griffith’s favorite cameraman, Billy Bitzer. Mr. Jacobs then manipulated Mr. Bitzer’s images — inverting them, slowing them to a halt, pulling them like taffy — as if to challenge the molecular structure of the ancient celluloid.
The resulting 115-minute film is a ghostly, poetic meditation on the alchemical process of filmmaking, the value of forgotten art and what adaptation really means. It became Mr. Jacobs’s signature work and a staple of avant-garde film class syllabuses. In 2007, “Tom, Tom” was added to the National Film Registry in a fitting, if ironic, act of preservation for what was once lost footage.
In addition to his son, Mr. Jacobs is survived by a daughter, Nisi Jacobs, an editor and musician. His wife, Florence (Beth Karpf) Jacobs, an artist who was known as Flo and who worked closely with her husband on film projects, died in June.
The couple were cast by Azazel Jacobs in his film “Momma’s Man” (2008), about a man who abandons his wife and infant, moves back in with his bohemian parents — a couple very much like the Jacobses — in their downtown Manhattan loft, and revisits his life as a child.
“That life includes his parents, who belong to a generation of Manhattan artists who have become as exotic as the last of the Mohicans,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review in The New York Times. “These are people who helped create not just a child but also a world.”
Kenneth Martin Jacobs was born on May 25, 1933, to divorced parents in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. He was initially raised by his mother, Janice Rosenthal, a writer and artist who was known as Zelda and submitted short stories to publishers as “Z. Rosenthal,” believing that disguising her female name increased her work’s chances of being accepted. She supported her son by working as a typist.
Ken was 7 when his mother died, leading to what he called a “disastrous but typical” early relationship with his father, Joe Jacobs, a onetime minor-league baseball player.
He was introduced to art cinema — including the films of Charlie Chaplin, Jean Vigo and Erich von Stroheim — at the Museum of Modern Art, an experience he later described as “a revelation.” After serving two years in the Coast Guard, he returned to New York, where he used his earnings to buy a film camera.
From 1966 to 1968, he and his wife were instrumental in the founding of the Millennium Film Workshop, a nonprofit filmmakers’ cooperative that offered production equipment, work space, screenings and classes to the general public at little or no cost.
By 1969, Mr. Jacobs was at the forefront of the American experimental film movement. At the same time, he began to pursue opportunities to teach. That year, he led a weeklong seminar at what is now Binghamton University in upstate New York as part of a course taught by a fellow experimental filmmaker, Larry Gottheim.
The stint proved so successful that students petitioned the administration to hire Mr. Jacobs full-time — which it did, despite his lack of a high school diploma. He and Mr. Gottheim created Binghamton’s department of cinema, the first of its kind in the State University of New York system, and the school became Mr. Jacobs’s professional home on and off for years.
His students included the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and the film critic J. Hoberman. Mr. Hoberman later said of the experience, “I had never encountered a teacher who could talk so passionately about art, spontaneously integrating political views and childhood recollections.”
Beginning in 1999, he embarked on a multi-decade series of audiovisual experiments he called Eternalisms, in which two-dimensional images were rendered three-dimensional through a complex editing system of his own invention. When these Eternalisms are screened on 2-D surfaces — in theaters, on computers, through YouTube — the human eye perceives an illusory depth previously unavailable without specialized 3-D glasses.
His final completed Eternalism, “The Whole Shebang” (2019), revisited a “projection-performance” that he first staged with Ms. Jacobs in 1982. The film centers on found black-and-white footage of Depression-era daredevils jumping through fire as they flicker in and out of perceptibility.
“I have a fascination with depth, with the illusion of depth,” Mr. Jacobs said on a return visit to Binghamton in 2012. “The screen has a certain 2-D ambiguity. Things can be where you think they are, and then they’re somewhere else. You can create irrational spaces.”
“It’s another way of perceiving the world,” he added.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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