“My approach to students had always to do with recognition of the individual; I never saw students as a mass. For me they were individuals as much as I was. What I brought into the classroom was a kind of theater, teaching theater, didactic theater. Many of the class-sessions were artworks, juxtapositions of this against that, making a thought-unit at the end. The classes were countless works of art.” - Ken Jacobs in Binghamton Babylon by Scott M. MacDonald
I first met Ken Jacobs in 1999 as an undergrad at SUNY Binghamton. He had been a professor in the Cinema Department since its founding in 1969, and developed its experimental ethos with program founder Larry Gottheim. His classes were unpredictable stand-up sessions where he riffed on whatever stuck in his craw that week - more Lenny Bruce than lecturer. That improvisational fury would be translated into his mad scientist Nervous System performances in Lecture Hall 6, in which he would manipulate dual 16mm projectors to create pulsating 3D effects that rewired my perceptual apparatus. At Binghamton Ken vastly expanded my view of what film, and film education, could be. And so I was determined, decades later, to convince him to release a career-spanning Blu-ray set of his work, which finally came out in 2021 as the Ken Jacobs Collection. His off-the-cuff pedagogy inspired hundreds of other students, including film critic J. Hoberman and filmmaker (and my classmate) Tomonari Nishikawa. I last heard from Ken this past April, reacting to Nishikawa’s death at the age of 56. Ken e-mailed me: “92 next month but old age loses its charm when I hear news like this. Tomonari was always young!” Ken would pass away on October 5th from kidney failure, four months after the death of his wife and collaborator Flo.
“I live in a state of constant appreciation of my wife”. - Ken Jacobs to Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3
Ken met Flo in the summer of 1961 on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Under the tutelage of abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, Ken had designs on becoming a painter, and left some canvases on the boardwalk to dry. It was there he chatted up Florence Karpf and artist Alice Meyer-Wallace. Flo was studying painting at RISD, from which she eventually dropped out, thinking her teachers’ work was “horrible.” Ken told me in an interview for Metrograph that, “We walked down the beach, the three of us, and my drawings brought me my bride. Until that moment she [Flo] figured I was an Italian jerk, an Italian punk with crazy ideas of being a painter. But she saw the drawings and said, ‘Yep, I’ll take him.’” They would be constant companions through a life of artmaking and child-rearing, proud parents of Nisi Ariana and Azazel, both formidable artists in their own right.
“From the first days of our friendship, I was aware that Flo functioned as the ‘reality principle’ in relation to Ken, who often envisions and desires the impossible. She is also the most trusted other pair of eyes for his work, bringing to this task an aesthetic that is highly compatible with his own, but-and this is important-which was formed before she met him. It was not, however, until I transcribed this interview that I realized that Flo Jacobs is nothing less than the producer of Ken Jacobs’ cinema.” - Amy Taubin, “Flo Talks!”, Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs
Azazel cast his parents, and their cluttered Tribeca loft, in his bittersweet arrested development indie Momma’s Man (2008). It was distributed by Kino Lorber, where I was doing Quality Control for home video. I lobbied to get Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) included as a bonus feature, in which Ken uses flicker to jog a Victorian stereoscopic photograph of tousle-haired kid workers to shuddering life. That planted the seed for the 2-Disc Ken Jacobs Collection. Azazel was an enormous help in moving that forward, both in the negotiation process and in organizing and completing the restorations of Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra (both restored by Anthology Film Archives and scanned by Colorlab, with support from Azazel Jacobs and Kino Lorber. Film Foundation provided support for Blonde Cobra). Ken was understandably protective of his work, and reluctant to license it to any distributor - but he recognized the value of physical media, and had been putting out some DVDs on his own. With Azazel’s patient encouragement we were able to come to a contractual agreement, and moved on to the sticky subject of what titles to include and leave out.
“So now I can answer what Ken Jacobs’ art is all about: It’s about happiness. He made a film called Little Stabs at Happiness, years ago. His shapes and forms transmit to us, evoke in us or rather produce in us the states and forms of radiance. You can feel happiness moving through you. Not an ignorant, fool’s happiness, but a happiness of one who is totally awake. Happiness in full consciousness. That’s the difference between art and LSD.” - Jonas Mekas, “Movie Journal” (July 17th, 1969), Village Voice
I wanted to make sure we covered every stylistic category in his protean output, from the cinema verite Orchard Street (1955), the junkyard street theater of the Platonic Underground Film Little Stabs at Happiness (1963), through structural film (via the manipulated found footage of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969)) and the 3D experiments he continued through the 2020s, like Capitalism: Child Labor, and the pulsating GIF “eternalisms” that he would post on Twitter (a version of which is represented by the Movie That Invites Pausing, 2021). But The Sky Socialist and The Sky Socialist: Environs and Outtakes were absent from my initial presentation, and those were two he was insistent upon. He told me that it was “the main film of the set and very dear to us. Even tells a story, the only one I ever had to tell.” He also added Window (1964), which led him to reminisce about Flo’s profile looking out onto Ferry Street. I dropped RAZZLE DAZZLE: The Lost World (2006), one of my personal favorites, in order to make it work. It was clear that to Ken, Sky Socialist and Window were central to the release, tied as they were to the beginning of his romance with Flo and the New York City of his youth.
“The culmination of Ken’s first period is The Sky Socialist, a feature-length movie shot on 8mm film in the mid ‘60s. Shabby and bucolic, The Sky Socialist (like Little Stabs) is a gestic allegory, largely confined to the cobblestone alleys around the old Fulton Fish Market, that silently play-acts a sort of triangle involving a miraculously spared Anne Frank (Flo Jacobs), an obscure symbolist writer Isadore Lhevinne (David Leveson) and a manic sharpie (Bob Cowan) who functions as a creepy reality principle and is occasionally countermanded by the Muse of Cinema (Julie Motz). The Sky Socialist may be the most unabashedly ecstatic of Jacobs’ films. The unused footage newly assembled as The Sky Socialist: Environs and Out-Takes, is a paean to a vanishing Lower Manhattan neighborhood in the throes of urban renewal—if not wholesale destruction. A pulverized city symphony and an archaeological trove, it has affinities to the photographer Danny Lyon’s contemporary work, The Destruction of Lower Manhattan, even as it miraculously restores this lost world to life.” - J. Hoberman, “Ken Jacobs: Film Philosopher”
The Ken Jacobs Collection was one of the most complicated projects I’ve ever worked on, and it took place in the grinding teeth of the pandemic. We were overseeing multiple new restorations with Ken giving voluminous notes, Aza was going through the family archive to find the best source material on the remaining films, I was commissioning cover art from Drusilla Adeline of Sister Hyde Design, I assigned and edited a brilliant new essay by J. Hoberman, coordinated an interview with Ken and film scholar Tom Gunning, and all of it was done remotely. Each step seemed to take forever, but everyone was patient and understanding. Aza was the heart and soul of the operation, but I am also very grateful to John Klacsmann from Anthology Film Archives for shepherding the restorations of Blonde Cobra and Little Stabs at Happiness to the finish line. Blonde Cobra was also problematic because we had to add instructions for the audience on when to turn on a radio talk show, which required forcing subtitles on during specific moments in the film to cue the viewers. I think it all works pretty well, but it was a laborious process. For Ken’s most famous film, we received a 2K restoration of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son from the Museum of Modern Art (thank you Katie Trainor!), but upon receipt discovered it ran 77 minutes, not close to the 116 we expected it to. But Ken and Flo explained that it should run at 16fps, not the 24fps standard, so once we slowed it down it played as they remembered.
“Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son is a shockingly different reconstruction film in which Jacobs, a combined historian-painter-camera nut, too endlessly reshuffles the parts of a rustic 1905 film about two boys and a piglet being chased around one-sided barns and cottages. The major part of an hour-long film is of not-totally abstract shapes in which there is enough of the specific pig-beret-fold to make for the movie’s trademark spiritual richness. Jacobs’ image of the wide black-white crumpled stripes in a boy’s pants or the goose-like neckline and upswept hair of a Chardin maid not only ravishes the eye but moves the spirit, much like a Seurat conté sketch on rough, pebbled paper. All of his pioneer moves–matting out whole areas, blurring, using the closest close-up on an elbow crease–are for going beyond illusionism, illustration, into a spirit world: what should be pure picturesque because of the quaint-corny material is really a turbulent experience of an analytic sensibility. By jamming the spectator right against the substance (a little boy rolls around with a pig in his arms, then rolls into the fireplace and is sucked up the chimney) and looking for the essential-irreducible elements of film, he is in the forbidding Serra-Snow area where the concepts of all his contemporaries are challenged.” - Manny Farber, Artforum (February 1970)
It was surreal to be working so closely with Ken, someone I had admired and feared as a callow college student. His reputation preceded him - he could eviscerate you with a snap of his ever-present temper, which didn’t seem to have mellowed after 30 years of teaching. And after graduation I followed his work closely, stunned by his throbbing threnody Two Wrenching Departures (2006, on the deaths of his friends Jack Smith and Bob Fleischner) and his found footage trash heap magnum opus Star Spangled to Death (1956-2004), a nearly 7 hour trawl that dredges the sunken history of American cultural production - which he posted for free on Vimeo.
“Of epic proportions, incredibly complex in meanings. It’s an absolute masterpiece that will be seen differently by every viewer. The greatest found-footage film. Yes, this is a film that sums it all up and you almost hate it, but at the same time you know it’s all true, it’s all true, this is all the America we live in, our home, the official America of the 20th century, here it is on the plate, so eat it and then vomit it all out. Luckily for me, this is not my America in this film: I live in another America, the America of my dreams.” - Jonas Mekas on Star Spangled to Death in the Brooklyn Rail
Regarding the Blu-ray project, he just seemed grateful to be revisiting so many of his films, pivotal moments in his personal and artistic life. His temper never raised above a simmer, disagreements or issues were all handled with equanimity. It was sheer serendipity that I was the one around to see it through 20 years after our brief time together in Binghamton. After the disc was released he was ready to move on to new projects, sending a list of titles for a proposed Volume 2 (which I hope can be revisited), and expressing astonishment at the new work he was doing. But he remained uncertain of his legacy, expressing worries that the isolation of COVID would lead to him being forgotten. But that is impossible, as the work he did with Flo stands for itself, one of the most head-spinning and mind-melting oeuvres in cinema history, now available to all those with curious minds and eyes to see.