Ken Jacobs, A Dealer in Remnants
The passing of experimental giant Ken Jacobs (1933–2025) in October closed a remarkable creative arc that had stretched across more than seven decades. From visions born in New York’s underground to audiovisual readymades presented unaltered, from psychedelic revivals of early cinema to cutting-edge probes into perception, Jacobs’s career traced a counter-history of American culture – one built on the unexplored capacities of the cinematic apparatus.
His body of work – dozens of films ranging from minimal, minute-long gestures to the nearly seven-hour magnum opus Star Spangled to Death (begun in 1957 and completed in 2004) – moves freely across cinema’s historical timeline. Trained as a painter under the broad umbrella of Abstract Expressionism and schooled by Hans Hofmann, Jacobs was a jack-of-all-trades: fascinated by devices, by ideologies, and by the strange alchemy through which images emerge as surfaces of visibility in perpetual contradiction. Vast in scope, his career gathers films that seem to converse across decades – an ongoing web of revisitations, deepened early intuitions, and afterthoughts that ultimately crystallise time itself.
Unlike contemporaries such as Jonas Mekas or Stan Brakhage, Jacobs didn’t really cultivate a style. What he had were loyalties – persistent lines of inquiry. At times, he borrowed from the Lettrists (Blonde Cobra, 1962); elsewhere, he toyed with structural film (Soft Rain, 1968). In 1955, not yet 22, he debuted with Orchard Street, a tender documentary of the famed New York street: a communal artery and a bustling marketplace unfolding before his camera in a cavalcade of eccentric characters, goods, and fleeting urban epiphanies. New York would remain his lifelong axis, an endlessly reconfigurable matrix. His filmography spans documentaries and fictions, found-footage collages and handheld recordings, meteor-like home movies, irreverent comedies, essays, and montage deconstructions. Endlessly curious yet rarely interested in conventional explanations or commercial framing, Jacobs was a major theoretical mind hiding behind a jester (or the other way around?) – someone bent on decolonising the visible and guiding us beyond it, toward buried impulses and repressed meanings.
His films are, quite literally, acts of bringing things to light. They move between spectacle and idea, hovering above an abyss where the heaven and hell of American mass culture coexist. Jacobs was a scavenger, equally at home in antiquarian shops and at the dump. Some footage – like the reel incorporated almost unchanged in Perfect Film (1986) – he literally salvaged from the trash. As a Jewish artist marked by transgenerational trauma, he spent a lifetime valuing what slipped through official atlases and sanctioned histories. In the 1950s, he befriended Jack Smith, simultaneously the pope and the muse of the American avant-garde, who became his sovereign model. “Directing Jack is like directing the wind,” Jacobs once said. This queer icon carried the experiments of that era – especially Blonde Cobra (shot and abandoned by another friend, Bob Fleischner), Star Spangled to Death, and its minor-key offshoot Little Stabs at Happiness (1960) – into the realm of deranged pranks, situationist dérives across rooftops and empty lots, and dances on forgotten graves. Dressed in whatever and muttering half-coherently, Smith becomes the flamboyant, camp hero of these ragged miniatures – street sketches channelling existential angst through purposeless détournements: pocket-sized art that makes you laugh until you want to scream. Years later, Jacobs reflected on these borderline experiences – part happening, part minimal fiction, part erratic, inspired wandering – in an interview preserved at Anthology Film Archives and highlighted by film scholar Tom Gunning:
Any way, we both [Jacobs and Jack Smith] became very interested in shit and the energy that was allowed when you come to the junctures of shit. You could find the seams where the shit would break open, you know, and it was really kind of an atomic fission. You know, this mindless banal crap could break open and give off fantastic aesthetic energy.
Very much of their time – see Ron Rice’s legendary The Flower Thief (1960), with beatnik Taylor Mead wandering around San Francisco in similar fashion – these rambles and half-coherent mutterings now read as early attempts to disrupt mainstream narrative expectations and impose an anti-aesthetic. Back then, they opened a surprising number of doors. Jonas Mekas, ever prone to hyperbole (as any dogmatic bard should be), saw Blonde Cobra as “the masterpiece of the Baudelairean cinema, and it is a work hardly surpassable in perversity, in richness, in beauty, in sadness, in tragedy. I think it is one of the great works of personal cinema, so personal that it is ridiculous to talk about author’s cinema.” As testaments to an allegorical lethargy creeping over the community, they contain the seed of a twilight manifesto whispered with the last remaining strength, constantly flirting with self-erasure and the absurd. Among Jacobs’ works from this period, The Sky Socialist (1965), his first feature, lends these ephemeral audiovisual scraps a kind of solemnity – a document of a singular moment in art history. Here, friends and collaborators (including his partner, Flo) drift through loose vignettes around the Brooklyn Bridge, a totemic presence and symbol of a neighbourhood on the cusp of radical transformation.
Yet nothingness – even when elevated to metaphysical heights – was never Jacobs’s only terrain. As a young man, he saw Rose Hobart (1936), the hypnotic montage by neurotic collector Joseph Cornell, who had chopped up a mediocre Hollywood film and turned it into a fever dream set in a mental jungle. In that moment, Jacobs understood he had found his path. The unconscious of film – the latent energy simmering beneath the surface of images – would become his ultimate horizon, the destination toward which all his major later experiments would gravitate, beginning with the absolute masterpiece Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969).
The antics he filmed with illuminated misfits like Jack Smith and Jerry Sims in the ’50s have their own indestructible charm – even mythic glimmers – but the inquiries that take shape in Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son are, by any measure, more mature. Starting from the 1905 short by Billy Bitzer (Griffith’s future cinematographer), which follows the misadventures of a thief who steals a pig and causes a pandemonium at a village fair, Jacobs performed a series of operations: slow motion, extreme magnification that plunges into the grain of the emulsion, and more. The result is a cornerstone of film history. Years before the famous Brighton Conference (1978) revived scholarly interest in early cinema, Jacobs was already revealing the sensory richness buried within these artefacts.
Through simple interventions, he estranges the original action until it becomes a realm of wonders. Some sequences foreground an animal’s point of view; others dig into the hidden topography of the images, a microscopic terrain; and others dissolve figurative forms into liquid abstraction. The film becomes a prototype of media archaeology, a shadow theatre, a cave painting – a perpetual oscillation between aberration and revelation. What emerges from these frames is no longer slapstick commotion but the bizarre granulation of film stock and the silent spectres of the past. It takes some training to fully appreciate the film’s cerebral yet tactile pleasures – a moving tableau, a tapestry of enigmatic gestures. Jacobs’s approach is not historical and academic but material and hauntological. No film is more obsessed with the depth hidden within seemingly flat surfaces, more determined to pierce the secret of appearances.
From here on, Jacobs’s cinema increasingly resembles a landscape of ruins, haunted by the folds of time embedded in images of every kind. The power of these appropriated and reanimated fragments cannot be reduced to an act of excavation and encounter with a new temporality. There is something mystical about it – like a pilgrimage through a cemetery and the occasional descent into a crypt, a risky ritual of summoning ghosts.
In The Doctor’s Dream (1977), Jacobs – who taught for years at the University of Binghamton – re-edits, with his students, an old Hollywood short called The Doctor, in which an elderly country doctor tends to a little girl. Following a structuralist principle, the team started from the film’s midpoint – they literally counted every shot – and then inserted one preceding shot and one subsequent shot at every step, gradually moving toward both ends of the story, until the new film ended with the original’s first and last images. The effect is disorienting, yet it opens the material toward a psychoanalytic sphere, awakening latent meanings. In many ways, The Doctor’s Dream is emblematic of Jacobs’s overall practice: guided by a mathematical principle, he reshapes a “found” work according to the wild harmonies of chance. ( Gunning recalls a moment in which the overworked doctor, in Jacobs’s version, is asked by his wife, “When are you coming to bed?”, and in the very next shot – purely by coincidence – he replies, “In three days.”) Rationality stretched to its limits unexpectedly reveals an enchanted world. By rearranging a mainstream plot, the film short-circuits narrative expectations and replaces them with an abstract logic unconcerned with “before” or “after.”
Even more radical, one could argue, is Perfect Film, a discarded reel documenting the aftermath of Malcolm X’s assassination as police and eyewitnesses answer reporters’ questions. Jacobs kept both image and sound exactly as he found them. What is there to see? Nothing particularly noteworthy, at least not at first – which is precisely the point. Jacobs delights in elevating these plain journalistic scraps through a Duchampian gesture: by giving them a title and signing them, he transforms raw, utilitarian footage into an artwork. A closer viewing reveals its own politics: glimpses of the African American community in the 1960s, the latent tensions between anonymous onlookers, white officers, and the murdered Black leader. Jacobs suggests that every image contains a surplus – an unruly remainder that resists assimilation. This becomes a kind of ground zero for the various methods he later used to dissect Hollywood’s signature-less detritus. The footage’s striking banality becomes the foundation for a “perfect” film, meaningful purely through its displacement into cinematic coordinates.
In 2004, Jacobs finally released Star Spangled to Death, which – after a jagged, half-century-long process – was no longer about the present but about the cultural strata of the 1950s in relation to post-9/11 America. That dual perspective makes it feel both retro and visionary, telescoping eras and tracing explosive continuities between them. The film is a precarious assemblage of audiovisual materials – from old Mickey Mouse cartoons to racist ethnographic newsreels and bombastic political speeches – as aggressive as a manifesto and as exhausting as channel surfing. In Jacobs’s oeuvre, it plays a role akin to Dracula in Radu Jude’s: a Frankensteinian collage united by a single, noisy obsession, pushing relentlessly toward a feeling of too much. If it weren’t a film, Star Spangled to Death would be a cubist tin contraption, a Jean Tinguely-style scrapyard machine with mismatched pieces dangling from its body. It is both a young man’s film, eager to fight the status quo, and an apocalyptic work shaped by an old man looking back un-reconciled from a present no less bleak. Its anti-capitalist fervour binds together its sprawling indictment. Much of the source material appears unaltered, in all its impunity; every so often, the spectral presence of Jack Smith or Jerry Sims punctures the triumphalism of this dark heap of memorabilia – a portrait of a culture built on relentless predation of the vulnerable. Jacobs’s anti-Americanism is matched only by his fascination – even love – for arbitrary audiovisual objects: a Cecil B. DeMille sequence or a report on monkey-infant experiments carry equal weight in this accusatory edifice, which culminates in furious intertitles condemning the Bush Jr. administration and the Iraq invasion.
During these same decades, Jacobs also developed a 3D device he called the “Nervous System,” a form of expanded cinema that required the filmmaker’s physical presence to operate the projector. It later evolved into “eternalism,” a technique that creates a volumetric illusion by projecting two nearly identical images with a slight temporal offset, akin to a binocular device. Though the scenes themselves are static, the use of negatives and flicker generates convulsive, psychedelic experiences. In the short Seeking the Monkey King (2011), the folds of a gold foil sheet are examined in extreme close-up until they resemble the surface of an alien planet. It’s a kind of real-time reanimation, an electric jolt that turns these silent frames into signals from the beyond. In the recent XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (2022), an early pornographic short is stretched to eighty minutes, and its protagonists appear as automatons trapped in an endless loop, surrendered to mechanical sensuality. The image vibrates, eroded by fissures and burns; at its centre lies, quite literally, a hole – an island of dread and darkness.
This impulse was already visible in The Georgetown Loop – a ten-minute film that critic J. Hoberman joked should receive an X rating for its “cast” – and in the more expansive Disorient Express (both from 1996). There, Jacobs split and mirrored simple footage of a 1903 train ride, so that the adjacent images created the impression of a mutant form: a liquid presence oscillating between butterfly, vagina, and some beastly architecture dictated by the frame’s irregular structure. A disturbingly carnal world claws its way toward us from cinema’s deep past, in the guise of a laboratory of boiling matter.
Far from any puritanical aestheticism, Jacobs’s explorations dug into the tangled undercurrents running through these scraps of deteriorating celluloid. Unlike Bill Morrison – who lingers contemplatively on the melancholy poetry of time etched into decaying film stock – Jacobs takes a hands-on approach, treating these remnants as reservoirs of volatile material, waiting to be cracked open and reworked with a kind of ecstatic curiosity. It’s no surprise, then, that the harmless little story in The Doctor ends up, in Jacobs’s version, hinting at something far darker: a pedophilic subtext brought to the surface through the uncanny timing between the stern look of an anxious father and the too-intimate attention of a lecherous doctor. Kuleshov’s experiment – with a twist. Working with old media means working with whatever lies dormant inside them. Only then can the past be revived as something other than a curated museum piece. Guided by a deep belief in progress and social justice, Jacobs turned his work into a space where speculative materialities, past futures, and repressed residues could resurface – proving that nothing within images is ever fully lost to history.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.