Ken Jacobs’s Optic Antics

On Sunday, that perpetually evolving lifelong project came to an end. Just four months after his wife, artist Flo Jacobs, passed away, Ken Jacobs died. He was ninety-two. “While the official cause of death was from kidney failure,” said their son, filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, “life without his collaborator and partner since 1960 was unimaginable for so many, especially him.”

Talking to R. Emmet Sweeney in Metrograph Journal a few years ago, Jacobs recalled meeting Florence Karpf on a beach one afternoon. He’d been drawing with paints on cardboard, and while at first she took him for a “jerk,” she then “saw the drawings and said, ‘Yep, I’ll take him.’” Years later, the couple wound up in a fourth-floor walk-up in Lower Manhattan that Jim Knipfel, who interviewed Ken Jacobs for the Brooklyn Rail in 2006, described as “a comfortably cluttered maze.”

Azazel Jacobs (The Lovers, French Exit, His Three Daughters) shot much of his 2008 film Momma’s Man there, casting Ken and Flo as the parents of a man-child (Matt Boren) who returns to the nest and refuses to leave. Nisi Jacobs, Ken and Flo’s daughter and a multimedia artist whose work has been presented at festivals and in galleries around the world, began working with her father when he went digital.

“Born in Williamsburg when the neighborhood was a Yiddish-speaking Jewish slum rather than a hipster haven, Ken talks like a son of Brooklyn and looks like a cousin to the Marx Brothers,” wrote J. Hoberman in a 2013 tribute in the New York Times to “an aspiring painter who turned to film to make action art by other means.” After a two-year stint with the Coast Guard in Alaska, Jacobs returned to New York to study with the renowned painter Hans Hofmann, who sparked in Jacobs a great quest, the evocation of depth from flat surfaces.

Jacobs also bought a Bell & Howell Filmo, the warhorse of 16 mm cameras, and headed out to shoot his first film, Orchard Street (1955), a twelve-minute revelry in the hustle and bustle of the Lower East Side. “This was a very Jewish street,” Jacobs told Arlette Hernandez of the Museum of Modern Art in 2024, “and what had happened with Nazis during World War II was evident. You could see people who had had close experiences with that. That was always in my mind, that this was a world where terrible things could happen, people could do terrible things to each other, and I had to come to terms with that, which I never have. I still have nightmares.”

Jacobs added that he’d recently taken another look at Orchard Street, “and I’m impressed by my young self. I was pretty good. I saw many stories happening in tiny gestures. It’s a good movie.”

A year after Orchard Street, Jacobs met Jack Smith, a feisty Texan who was already making a name for himself in New York’s underground cinema scene. “Jack and I really amused ourselves,” Jacobs told Sweeney. “So I began filming the things we were doing. But it was extemporaneous street theater. And Jack was defiantly wild, okay? There’s nothing I could imagine that he wouldn’t do on-screen; if there was a camera there, he would do it.”

With Smith, Jacobs began work on Star Spangled to Death, a dauntingly ambitious project that wouldn’t be completed until 2004, as well as Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), which Jonas Mekas championed as a masterpiece of the New American Cinema, and Blonde Cobra (1963), “the greatest nunsploitation film of the American avant-garde,” according to Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope.

Little Stabs and Blonde Cobra “thrilled me because they were at once strange and familiar,” writes the NYT’s Manohla Dargis. “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.”

After Smith and Jacobs parted ways, the former made his landmark Flaming Creatures (1963), and the latter began teaching at the State University of New York at Binghamton. One of his students, J. Hoberman, “had never encountered a teacher who could talk so passionately about art, spontaneously integrating political views and childhood recollections. There were no notes. His method was what Jewish stand-up comics call a shpritz.”

Hoberman was also the projectionist for these classes in which Jacobs would have him stop a film, reverse it, and edge forward again for a frame-by-frame analysis. “It’s possible that Ken was the first moviemaker to use the projector seriously as his instrument,” suggests Hoberman.

“This method of taking films apart was more than a teaching tool for Jacobs; it became the key to his artistic practice,” writes David Schwartz in a piece for Screen Slate on Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son (1969), an innovative study of a 1905 one-reeler directed by Billy Bitzer, who went on to work with D. W. Griffith as a cinematographer. Tom, Tom is “analytical,” writes Schwartz, “but it is also highly sensuous. Annette Michelson captured this when she wrote Jacobs ‘first offers the film in extenso, then proceeds . . . to reshoot the film for one hour, with what one can only describe as a loving, indeed, an amorous caressing and exhibition of the film’s hitherto obscured, intimate parts.’”

The Nervous System, a series of works and performances begun in the mid-1970s, often saw Ken and Flo Jacobs operating two projectors to conjure an illusion of three dimensions from one two-dimensional film shown out of sync by no more than a single frame. Reviewing the 2011 collection Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs for Artforum, P. Adams Sitney declared that these were “the most impressive paracinematic works we have ever seen.”

“These works are as vital and challenging as anything done in the history of avant-garde film,” wrote Tom Gunning on the occasion of a 1989 retrospective. “I have never watched a Nervous System performance without the vertiginous sensation that I was teetering out of control on the brink of some primal threshold. One begins to synthesize spaces that make no sense (the moments in all the films when foreground and background seem to change places), and to envision images that aren’t truly there (the monstrous faces that seem to materialize in the flames of the ‘wall of death’ stunt that opens The Whole Shebang [1982/2019]).”

Jacobs presented Perfect Film (1986) exactly as he found it, a string of outtakes from a 1965 television report on the assassination of Malcolm X. Jacobs discovered the footage on a reel he picked up on Canal Street for five dollars. For Gunning, “Perfect Film starkly reveals Jacobs’s paradoxical view of filmmaking as a process that doesn’t necessarily require a filmmaker’s conscious intentions to be meaningful.”

The seven-hour Star Spangled to Death, on the other hand, was the result of half a century of on-again, off-again intentional tinkering. “Not so much his masterpiece as his trash-heap Colossus, the film imagines the exhaustion of the late 1950s from the horror of the Bush II years,” wrote Whitney Strub for Screen Slate in 2020.

Azazel Jacobs told Arlette Hernandez that the “strangest thing about the film is that it’s unrelentingly about depressing, horrific things, and at the same time, I find it an extremely joyful movie, ultimately. It does seem to be an oddly optimistic film about just being grateful to be alive and to have this time on this world and this planet.” Dispatching from Rotterdam to Senses of Cinema in 2004, Genevieve Yue called Star Spangled “incredibly entertaining, funny, and accessible—perhaps more so than any avant-garde film I’ve ever seen.”

But Jacobs was also “a tireless artistic whistleblower, documenting and cataloging the ugliest aspects of American culture,” wrote Michael Sicinski for Notebook in 2015. “From blackface and animal torture in Star Spangled to Death, through colonialist aggression in Camera Thrills of the War and Making Light of History: The Philippines Adventure, and the resistance to official history in more recent works like Circling Zero: We See Absence and Blankets for Indians, Jacobs has consistently made films that reject the spectacles and bromides with which the power elite mean to keep us pacified and uninformed. For Jacobs, it is never enough to promote beauty. He must also combat stupidity.”

In 2019, Jacobs completed a project begun fifty-five years earlier that bore witness to the vanishing of a neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. “Like earlier versions of The Sky Socialist,” wrote Amy Taubin for Film Comment, “the latest to carry that title still brings to mind the Bob Dylan lyric, recorded during that same mid-1960s moment, ‘She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all.’ While that might seem equivocal, I mean it as high praise. The Sky Socialist: The Environs, however, is a masterpiece, not only of avant-garde movies, or cityscape movies, or documentary essays, but a movie masterpiece, no modifiers needed.”