Ken Jacobs

Explores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman including the creation and ground-breaking impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS.

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One of the most extraordinary personalities in the history of moving images, native New Yorker Ken Jacobs, and his wife and long-time creative partner Flo Jacobs, sit down for a series of discussions, reflecting on numerous clips from the many films and performances conjured onto screens since 1955 and through to today. From the antic collaborations with Jack Smith and company as a central artist in the 1960s underground film movement, through later, seminal, ground-breaking formalist works which expanded his recognition by The Museum of Modern Art and other major cultural institutions, to his invention of the Nervous System and the Cyclopean 3D patented Eternalism and remarkable musical collaborations (with JG Thirlwell, Aki Onda, Nisi Jacobs, Michael Schumacher and others) of his recent work, Jacobs demonstrates and articulates his endless fascination and pursuit of exceptional, moving image art.

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Founded by Richard Linklater in 1985 as a screening series dedicated to bringing experimental and art cinema to the city of Austin, Texas, the Austin Film Society has grown into a cornerstone of the city's creative community - while remaining true to its edgy, eclectic roots.

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A celebration of Ken Jacobs' work at 80WSE.

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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.

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For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.

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A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.

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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.

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In celebration of his 80th birthday, here is: THE ETERNAL COURTSHIP (an ipad short) For Ken and Flo Jacobs, with love and affection from all of us out here who bask in the glow...

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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.

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Unable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.

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Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

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

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A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

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The documentary’s starting point is the discovery and restoration of a rare and unknown photography reel reproduced from a mutoscope film, made in 1901 in London, about Santos Dumont (1873 – 1932). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.

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A wholesome moment: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra, Ken Jacobs, and Flo Jacobs take lavender from a stranger's bush.

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An adult decides to escape the pressures of life and return to his old bedroom at his parents' house.

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This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

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In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

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An examination of the history of the U.S. through archival footage and contrasting views of society, incorporating audiovisual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, featuring Al Jolson, Mickey Mouse, the young Jack Smith, and a half-dozen American presidents.

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In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend Ken Jacobs is "interviewed" by my urbane 12-year old M.C., Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, and creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, I, as filmmaker turned "media artist", employ the full range of temporal manipulation available within my concurrent digital set-up, exploiting unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs' own work within the arcanum of film. The "musical score" is derived through permutations of the sync track. This was the first released section from the ongoing series, premiering March 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.

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Features interviews with famed underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs and associates, and screens in full two rare Jacobs works: Nissan Ariana Window, and Spaghetti Aza.

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"I filmed Flo and Ken Jacobs in 2001 when they visited me in my studio (the School of Artistic Photography, Vienna). Our acquaintance, friendship began in 1974. Flo and Ken had witnessed the wild, avant-garde years of independent film in New York. They are practiced New Yorkers. Maybe that's why I thought I could be actionistic and surprising to them while filming: I took the contents of Ken's breast pocket. Ken got angry, as you can see. I hereby apologize in retrospect". (Friedl vom Gröller 2021)

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A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

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Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

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Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.

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Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.

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

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

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Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.

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Working with Virgil’s four-part poem “Georgics” and Antonio Vivaldi’s concertos “The Four Seasons” as models, Gottheim arranged his painterly compositions into four distinct sections, each edited according to its own exacting pattern. The seasonal flux thus informs both the form and content of the image, with the basic elements of trees, sky, hills and the occasional crisscrossing clothesline filmed in every imaginable light.

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During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

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In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.

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Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

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"The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.

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A man fondles objects, looks at himself in the mirror, poses in different clothes, smiles and makes faces at the camera while his voice on the soundtrack speaks of his despair, makes impressionistic statements and little songs, quotes Greta Garbo and Maria Montez, tells the story of a lonely little boy and tells the story of a woman named Madame Nescience who dreams of herself as the Mother Superior of a convent of sexual perversion.

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Abstract short in Jacob's current 3D style.

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Early 20th-century street vendors push their carts loaded with vegetables. It is time for them to go. Little by little, the viewer discovers fragments of the film of that reduced space in which multiple actions are occurring. The films' technique, The Nervous System, succeeds once more in creating the illusion of visual depth.

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A stroboscopic train ride along a jungle stream. Asian military men appear with their pith-helmets, keeping the ferns, trees, monkeys, natives in line. The master of the stroboscopic depth illusion changes.

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A 3-D vacation album, The Day Was a Scorcher pictures what Jacobs describes as "movie-star Flo, Nisi the thoughtful young girl, and Aza old enough to trudge with the rest of us, but still expecting to be pushed around on wheels," frolicking in a sun-drenched Rome in the 1970s. Explains Jacobs, "It's a perfect day when nothing happens."

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First created and presented as a Tzadik New Jewish Culture offering in 1993. First performed live as a Nervous System performance with Catherine Jauniaux performing onstage, this version has been reconstructed from scratch (film-frame by film-frame) on the computer. This current embodiment does not hesitate to electronically embrace the fish-peddlers and buyers of 1903.

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A story told by director Ken Jacobs but without conventional storyline. Using a modified magic lantern, an early type of image projector developed in the 17th century, he morphs, flickering images that look like photo-negatives.

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Abstract avantgarde film.

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An examination of the history of the U.S. through archival footage and contrasting views of society, incorporating audiovisual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, featuring Al Jolson, Mickey Mouse, the young Jack Smith, and a half-dozen American presidents.

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Found Footage avantgarde film.

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Avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs presents Buster Keaton's short silent comedy Cops (1922) as his own work by blacking-out approximately the top three-fourths or four-fifths of the frame.

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The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience's sense of gravity. The camera's movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns). About four years of studying the window-complex preceded the afternoon of actual shooting (a true instance of cinematic action-painting). The film exists as it came out of the camera barring one mechanically necessary mid-reel splice

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