Some moviemakers sweep you away with the beauty of their images while others seduce you with their technique. They strive to entertain, inform and persuade you. In turn, you laugh and cry, then the credits roll. The avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who died Sunday at 92, operated on another level. Working outside the constraints of commercial movies — his films were shown in galleries, festivals, museums and even New York display windows — Jacobs made movies that changed your ideas about what cinema is and could be. He expanded your sense of the art and your horizons, lit up your brain and blew your mind.
Jacobs repeatedly blew my mind, although it took me awhile to understand what he was doing and why, much less why it mattered. The first Jacobs film I watched was “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” (1969-71), which is among his most important and instructive. I saw it in college a lifetime ago, and simply didn’t get it. Running nearly two hours long, it is a silent, experimental exploration of cinema itself that uses a 1905 film of the same title as its jumping-off point. The original is effectively an extended chase: In about 10 minutes, a boy steals a pig from a crowded street fair, is rambunctiously pursued by townspeople and finally caught.
The end of the 1905 film is just the start for Jacobs’s. He opens with the entire original short. After a pause, he shifts to a rephotographed version that he made, which he ingeniously manipulates. He zeros in on details you may have missed the first time you watched the original, like a waddling goose and the soon-to-be-purloined pig meandering amid the legs of the townspeople. He stops and restarts the flow of images, speeds up the film until it blurs and makes it flicker and stagger. He pans across the frame and cuts in for a view so close that bodies turn into grainy blobs. The results are weird, and mesmerizing.
My younger self was too habituated to mainstream cinema to make sense of Jacobs’s movie. It seemed overly opaque, confusing. What I didn’t understand about “Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son” at that point was that Jacobs was inviting me to see the 1905 movie — and, by extension, cinema itself — with newly opened eyes. Based on an old nursery rhyme, the original is simplicity itself in narrative terms. Once you get past the story, though, as Jacobs lovingly makes clear, you can see there’s more here than “boy steals pig”: There’s light, dark, shapes, pointillist grain, bodies in motion, agog faces, choreography and anarchic life. (I got it, finally.)
Jacobs was drawing attention to the original’s form and material properties, but also its charms and mysteries. As he returns to the 1905 short repeatedly, he alternately brings to mind a scientist making a thrilling discovery under a microscope and a jeweler marveling at every facet of a precious gem. He was savoring the original’s complexities while, as he put it in an exhibitor’s catalog, “delighting in the whole bizarre human phenomena of storytelling itself.” He also was reminding us that while there’s something eerie about old films — their people are now ghosts — there is pathos, too, including in how we look at them. We imagine that we can read the past through such films, but this is “a dream within a dream!”
I took more readily to other Jacobs movies, including “Little Stabs at Happiness” (1958-60), a mesmerizing, non-narrative reverie that opens with the sui generis performer-filmmaker Jack Smith — a cigarette clenched in his teeth and a crude turban swaddling his head — and a woman frolicking in and out of a bathtub like overgrown children. Jacobs soon cuts to a woman posing on a roof. “One interesting thing I have to say,” an offscreen Jacobs notes after mentioning the time and day, “is that almost no one in this film do I see anymore.” He ticks off some names as the movie continues to show different men and women. At one point, Jacobs appears drawing chalk images on streets with a cluster of actual children.
“Little Stabs” and the more outré “Blonde Cobra” (1959-60) — in which Smith vamps in smeared lipstick and another turban like a Hollywood casualty adrift in a bohemian junk heap — thrilled me because they were at once strange and familiar. Both take place in the old, unreconstructed New York and have a palpable sense of the city’s time and place, from the blacktop roofs on which Smith cavorts to the cobblestone street where a man and woman partake in a domestic pantomime, as if from a straighter, drearier reality. With their playfulness, eccentric beauty, handmade aesthetic, constellation of ideas, vulgar humor and disregard for norms (aesthetic, social), these films felt wholly liberated. They still do.
The old, lost New York is a constant in Jacobs’s work, beginning with “Orchard Street” (1955-2015), his first film. Shot with a 16-millimeter camera, it is a beautiful, fascinating look at the lively, pregentrified Lower East Side street of the title back when it was crowded with small, crammed stores and overflowing stalls that sold clothes, shoes, eyeglasses, food and seemingly everything else under the sun. With appreciable sensitivity to color, shape and texture, Jacobs by turns pulls back and narrows in on the street and its surging human flow. He points his camera up at laundry fluttering on a clothesline stretched across the sky and points it down at a child hiding in a cardboard box; he shows you a world.
Jacobs continued making movies in the decades that followed, including collaborations with friends and family, notably his wife, Flo. (She died in June.) His output was prodigious and astonishing. Among his many projects is the seven-hour-plus “Star Spangled to Death,” which is effectively a politically enraged, despairing, at times darkly funny epic-autopsy of American history. In one section, Jacobs cuts from Richard M. Nixon finishing his 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which the future president responded to accusations of misusing campaign funds, to a grinning cartoon character banging on a piano: That’s entertainment, folks! Using a wide range of found and original material, visual and audio, Jacobs began it in the 1950s, tinkered with it on and off, and finished it nearly a half-century later.
By that time, Jacobs was also experimenting with cinematic depth in his singular way. Beginning in the 1970s, he and Flo began doing live performances using two side-by-side projectors, identical film strips and a rotating shutter to make optical effects, including an illusion of depth as rich as any lavish 3-D spectacle (without the funny glasses). In 2009, for an article, I visited the Jacobses at their Chambers Street loft where, using a device called the Nervous Magic Lantern, Ken hid behind a black curtain — like a bohemian Wizard of Oz — to create strangely beautiful images from light and shadow. This invention was a variation on a proto-cinematic machine, dating from at least the Renaissance, called the magic lantern.
In more recent years, Jacobs began creating what he called Eternalisms, short, trippy digital works that he made using a still camera with two lenses and a computer. Although some Eternalisms look like animated abstract expressionist paintings, my favorites offer glimpses of New York in its glory, from a gorgeous street throbbing with color at night (the word “joyful” pops in one corner) to a daytime scene of people crowding around a street vendor’s wares. These works hark back to other Jacobs New York ventures, including “Orchard Street.” They also pointedly recall early prenarrative films known as actualities in which image makers, by immortalizing the everyday — workers leaving a factory, a couple feeding a baby — discovered a new reality, one that Jacobs continuously rediscovered throughout his life.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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