Ken Jacobs

Overview

Known for
Acting
Gender
Other
Birthday
May 25, 1933 (92 years old)

Ken Jacobs

Known For

Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages
1h 0m
Movie 2022

Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages

This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology’s voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of characters ranging from legendary avant-garde filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural figures to civilians whose legend has (until now) been confined to the offices of Anthology, thanks precisely to their witty, eloquent, eccentric – or in some cases unforgettably psychotic – voicemails. We’ve toyed with the idea of sharing these messages in some form for years, and the “Imageless Films” series provides a perfect pretext.

What Is Cinema?
1h 20m
Movie 2013

What Is Cinema?

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.

Emma's Dilemma
1h 23m
Movie 2012

Emma's Dilemma

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin
1h 51m
Movie 2011

Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin

A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
2h 29m
Movie 1986

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Home Movies 1971-81
1h 50m
Movie 1985

Home Movies 1971-81

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Biography

A pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s, Ken Jacobs is a central figure in post-war experimental cinema. From his first films of the late 1950s to his recent experiments with digital video, his investigations and innovations have influenced countless artists. A New Yorker by birth, Jacobs graduated from City University to find himself in the midst of the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which included artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and the experimental theater troupes of Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Although Jacobs had studied painting with Hans Hoffman, he quickly gravitated to film, finding kindred spirits in radical filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton. An early friendship with Jack Smith yielded several collaborations, including the seminal underground films Blonde Cobra (which Jonas Mekas dubbed "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema") and Little Stabs at Happiness, as well as a Provincetown beach-based live show, The Human Wreckage Review.

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