Ken Jacobs, luminary of New York underground film culture, dies aged 92

Renowned experimental film-maker Ken Jacobs, whose works such as Little Stabs at Happiness, Blonde Cobra and Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son made him a key member of the underground film circuit of the 1960s, has died aged 92. His son Azazel Jacobs, also a film-maker, told the New York Times that he died of kidney failure in hospital on Sunday.

Described by the New York Times as “the éminence grise of the American avant garde”, Jacobs and his wife Flo, with whom he collaborated on much of his work, straddled the worlds of experimental art and American new wave film-making, along with the likes of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. He was a founding member of New York’s Film-Makers’ Co-Operative and the first director of the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966, both of which offered a space for film-makers working outside the mainstream and which are still operating today.

In an interview with the Museum of Modern Art in 2024, Jacobs said that he and Flo worked like “two painters seeing what was possible in showing film in unexpected ways and finding unexpected things happening”. He added: “We weren’t just telling stories, movies with one shot, next shot, each shot hitting off the other one and making it tell a further element of the story. It was really to see things, to see coloured space operating, being vital, moving.”

Born in New York in 1933, Jacobs went to the School of Industrial Art but dropped out; after serving in the Coast Guard he studied with painter Hans Hofmann and made his first film, Orchard Street, in 1955. An impressionistic study of the street in New York’s Lower East Side, Jacobs later said it was about “many stories happening in tiny gestures”.

Jacobs also regularly attended Cinema 16, another avant garde outpost, which immersed him in the experimental film-making culture of the time, inspired by Maya Deren. Little Stabs at Happiness, a compendium of four short pieces, was filmed between 1959 and 1963, in collaboration with fellow artist-film-maker Jack Smith, who appears in two of the shorts. (Jacobs’ voiceover suggests that he fell out with Smith by the end of the film-making process.)

Blonde Cobra also featured Smith, in footage shot and abandoned in the 1950s by Smith and Bob Fleischner. With its home-made camp aesthetic, and title inspired by Blonde Venus and Cobra Woman, two of Smith’s favourite films, Blonde Cobra became a key entry in 60s experimental film – premiering in 1963 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in a double bill with Smith’s celebrated short Flaming Creatures. In his Village Voice column Movie Journal, Mekas described it as “a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy”.

Jacobs reached arguably a high point in film-making influence in 1969, with the 115-minute Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, a radical reexamination, restructuring and reformatting of a scrap of silent film shot in 1905 by Billy Bitzer in cinema’s early years. Endlessly replaying it, slowing sections down, cropping in and letting the film jump through the projector gate; the film becomes a mesmeric experience at extreme length. It was added to the National Film Registry for preservation in 2007.

In 1969 Jacobs also began teaching film at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York. His output slowed for several years, but revived again in the 1990s and in 2004 he released Star Spangled to Death, a six-hour magnum opus of footage he had been compiling since the 1950s, again featuring Smith and also incorporating segments of documentary, TV shows and cartoons, described by Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as “a history lesson of sorts and a satire on white American entitlement”.

One of Jacobs’ long-term interests was attempting to overcome film’s two-dimensional surface; in the mid-1970s he and Flo deployed a double-projector installation called a Nervous Magic Lantern and in 2006 he patented a stroboscopic-style editing system known as “eternalism”, designed to add depth to onscreen images.

In 2008 Jacobs appeared alongside Flo in Azazel Jacobs’ feature Momma’s Man as the parents of the central character.

Flo Jacobs died in June, and in a statement to Variety Azazel said: “While the official cause of death was from kidney failure, life without his collaborator and partner since 1960 was unimaginable for so many, especially him.” Jacobs is survived by children Azazel and Nisi, an artist.