Ken Jacobs obituary: giant of the American avant-garde working at the limits of perception

Together with his long-term partner Flo Jacobs, Ken emerged as a towering figure of the post-war avant-garde, whose work straddled politics, play and illusions while pushing beyond the traditional limits of cinema.

Flo and Ken JacobsWilliam Rose

“I am in fact an all-around sensualist.” In this statement, the American artist and filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who has died aged 92, gestured to the inseparability of life and art that exemplified his every day. For him, art, politics and perception weren’t just entwined; they were integral to the business of living and getting on with the world – looking, moving, feeling, being in it. A walk through New York’s Chinatown, just two blocks from the Tribeca loft Ken had shared with his wife Flo since 1966, could be art of the highest order. The city remained an instrument, something that ignited the senses and allowed us to rethink supposedly stolid precedents.

As an artist, filmmaker, talker and thinker, Jacobs was one of the few truly major figures in the American post-war avant-garde film movement. Early works such as Little Stabs at Happiness (1960) and Blonde Cobra (1963) traversed new ground, wresting film from its industrial confines and the clutches of narrative. They were also among the first titles distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative when it was founded in 1962, with Jacobs himself serving as a board member and director during its early years. In 1966, he and Flo created the Millennium Film Workshop, aiming to make filmmaking tools accessible to artists seeking to use them “other than as an instrument of economic exploitation”. Ken described it as a community and socialist enterprise – a “film school of the street”. 

Blonde Cobra (1963)

Indeed, as we celebrate Ken, we must also remember the great Flo Jacobs, his collaborator and lifelong partner, who died in June of this year. Ken would’ve been the first to agree – Flo was the lynchpin of it all. His Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern works were performed in concert with her and, throughout his long career, she remained his enduring and trusted audience. During a period of waning public interest in his work in the 1980s, Ken noted: “What a lucky man I am to be living with my audience.” Their correspondence was often signed “KenFlo.” 

Alongside a remarkable body of films, digital works, interventions and performances produced over seven decades, Jacobs was also an influential and radical teacher of cinema. A true raconteur, his visionary approach found a home in teaching, a practice that reached its apotheosis during his decades at SUNY Binghamton (1969 to 2003), where the classroom became an extension of his creative work. Perhaps it was here that his gritty, incisive perspectives on politics, social history, capitalism, representation, race and ethnicity found their clearest and most sustained articulation.

Flo and Ken Jacobs in their studioJoshua Charow

Largely self-taught, Jacobs was born in 1933 into a broken family in the Jewish community of Williamsburg. He left high school with no qualifications. What he did gain from school, though, was access to a free pass to MoMA (now the principal repository of his work following their acquisition of 212 of his film and video works in 2023). Here, as a teenager, he first encountered abstract painting and works of world cinema.

Following compulsory service in the US Coast Guard toward the end of the Korean War – his application for conscientious objector status was rejected, but joining the Coast Guard ensured he would not be sent to fight – Jacobs was able to pursue a modest education in art and film. Eventually he found his way to the famous Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts. Hofmann’s concept of “push and pull” – whereby sensations of depth and movement are abstractly generated by activating the picture plane (the canvas) with colour and shape – would come to influence Jacobs’ work with the moving-image screen, seeing it as a means for spatial, sensory and perceptual discovery. 

But if discovery was always his goal, then to “get lost and get lost again” was his method. In 1970, Jacobs coined the term “paracinema” to describe “a cinematic work employing some of the consciousness and values, but not the traditional means of cinema.” This necessitated moving beyond the medium of film to explore the radical possibilities of perception. 

For Jacobs, thinking about cinema’s future always involved reckoning with its past – from magic lanterns to the cinema of attractions. His two-projector set-up The Nervous System used a shutter to rapidly alternate between frames in a film sequence. This combination of heavy flicker and incremental image movement conjured impossible depths from found films. Later came the Nervous Magic Lantern, where material objects and light itself became a form of living sculpture.

Nervous Magic Lantern was performed at BFI IMAX in 2008

Jacobs called this effect, and the digital descendants of these works, “eternalisms” – moments that “stay, don’t repeat, but keep happening”. “I’m very involved with illusionism,” he said, “not as trickery, but as something to be experienced.”  

Ken had an extraordinary ability to defuse formality and stuffiness, making even the largest cinema or performance space feel alive and intimate, both through his work and his presence. I remember attending one of his Nervous System performances at Anthology Film Archives with my young daughters. When we stepped out, worried their chatter and babble might disturb the silence, Ken demanded to know where his soundtrack had gone. On another occasion, I found myself reluctantly paraded before a large audience at the Tribeca Film Festival after a screening of Le Prince: Leeds Bridge 1888 (2005), so they could hear what a real Leeds accent sounded like.

For me it is in the smaller gestural parts of Ken’s work where his artistic vision and his personality intertwine most. Like the idea of having Jack Smith spend 30 minutes opening the curtains before his epic Star Spangled to Death (2004), already seven hours long, was first screened. Or taking his student audience to the university toilets to experience the mirror reflections and tile arrangements and to listen to the flushing sounds in the dark. Or projecting slides on to panels painted with luminescent paint so that the glowing images could be shared among audience members during an intimate performance at Anthology Film Archives. Or creating a site-specific performance at the Washington Square Methodist Church, that involved lovingly lighting the interior over a 60-minute runtime, as though it were a film.

Star Spangled to Death (2004)MoMA

His work was always political. Even when it appeared preoccupied with illusion and play, he never shied away from the brutalities and hypocrisies of the real world. Works like Capitalism: Slavery (2007) and Reichstag 9/11 (2016) are testament to his drive to unify cinema’s dreamland visions and its astute act of witness, all refracted into a kind of tragic beauty. Reflecting on his friendship and early film collaborations with Jack Smith in the late 1950s, Jacobs said, “Play was protest. In this infinitely stupid society, to manage to play was an achievement – it was to live in protest.”

That Ken – socialist, anti-capitalist and idealist to the core – spent his final years living under a political regime so opposed to his worldview is saddening. Yet, as he once said, “Despair is collaboration with the enemy.” Art and life are acts of resistance, and both have to go on.

  • Ken Jacobs, 25 May 1933 to 5 October 2025