Visionary film artist Ken Jacobs dies at 92

Ken Jacobs, the New York-raised experimental filmmaker and artist, passed away at the age of 92 in a hospital in Manhattan on October 5, 2025. Described by The New York Times as an “eminence grise of the American avant garde” for his pioneering experiments with cinematic form, Jacobs – alongside his peers Jack Smith and Jonas Mekas – revolutionized film art in the 1960s. His film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969), a significant found footage work re-photographed from the eponymous 1905 original, was included in the National Film Registry in 2007.

Born Kenneth Martin Jacobs on May 25, 1933 in Brooklyn, he attended the School of Industrial Art but dropped out; he served a two-year stint in the US Coast Guard off the coast of Alaska, before moving back to New York and studying art with the German-born artist Hans Hoffman. It was this experience, as well as his acquaintance with Jack Smith in 1956, that set him on the course of experimental filmmaking. His first film Orchard Street, an impressionistic study of the street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was shot in 1955.

Jacobs was a regular at Cinema 16, the legendary film society established by Amos Vogel in 1947, where he immersed himself in the avant-garde filmmaking culture of the time and came into contact with fellow icons of experimental film such as Mekas, Maya Deren, and Stan Brakhage. It was during the late 1950s that Jacobs began compiling the footage for Star Spangled To Death (2004), a 440-minute cinematic behemoth composed of archival footage, through which he examines the history of the United States. The film is a searing indictment of American culture assembled from over 100 years of commercial cinema.

The 1960s represented a period of burgeoning creativity for Jacobs, with his first major experimental film Little Stabs at Happiness being completed in 1960. This 15-minute work was followed in 1963 by Blonde Cobra, a movie described by Jacobs as “a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering prefashionable Lower East Side deprivation and consumed with American 1950s, '40s, ‘30s disgust.” Jacobs crafted the film out of footage which had been made and abandoned by fellow filmmakers Smith and Bob Fleischner, lending it a homemade camp aesthetic that made it a classic.

His wife Florence Jacobs, with whom he collaborated on many projects, passed away in June 2025. Together with her and a group of close collaborators, Jacobs established the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966, a non-profit media arts center devoted to the exhibition, study and practice of experimental and avant-garde film. In 1969, Jacobs made his celebrated film Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, an 86-minute piece in which he teases out the visual content contained in a short segment, replaying it multiple times, slowing it down, cropping it and allowing it to jump through the projector gate.

During the 1970s, Jacobs worked on overcoming the two-dimensionality of space in film and, in collaboration with his wife, he deployed a double-projector installation that they dubbed the Nervous Magic Lantern. In 2006, they patented a stroboscopic-style editing system known as an “eternalism”, which allows the creator to add depth to an onscreen image. Concurrent with his career as a film artist, Jacobs worked as a professor at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 2002.

Jacobs received numerous awards and grants, such as the Maya Deren Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts. His works have been featured at major art institutions and festivals all over the world. In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired more than 200 moving image works by Jacobs for their permanent collection, which makes it the principal institutional repository for his work. Jacobs is survived by his son, the film director Azazel Jacobs, and his daughter, the artist and musician Nisi Ariana Jacobs.