Happy 87th Birthday, Ken Jacobs! Born today in 1933, this American experimental filmmaker was a pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Jacobs, years later, graduated from City University to find himself in the midst of the downtown art scene of the 1960s.
This included American painter Robert Rauschenberg and American artist, producer and director Andy Warhol ('Vinyl'), American beat poet, philosopher and writer Allen Ginsberg and American beat poet and novelist Jack Kerouac.
IT also included the experimental theater troupes of American choreographer Trisha Brown and American dancer Yvonne Rainer.
Although Jacobs had studied painting with American-German Hans Hoffman, he quickly gravitated to film, finding kindred spirits in radical filmmakers such as American-Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas and American pioneer of digital art, theoretician, photographer, writer and avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton.
An early friendship with American photographer. actor, filmmaker, "queer muse" in New York avant-garde art in the 1960s and 1970s and American filmmaker, actor, pioneer of underground cinema Jack Smith ('Flaming Creatures') yielded several collaborations.
This included the seminal underground films 'Blonde Cobra' (of which Mekas dubbed "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema").
This also included the fifteen-minute 1960 American color short film 'Little Stabs at Happiness'.
The following year, Jacobs did a collaboration with Smith's first performance piece, a "nightclub act": the 1961 beach-based live show in Provincetown, Massachusetts called The Human Wreckage Review.
By 1962, Jacobs' own falling out with Smith had cooled sufficiently to enable him to record a soundtrack for which Jacobs mixed 78 rpm records and strummed inside a piano. This was for Jacob's upcoming underground short film, and would also be the film for which Jacobs would be best known.
This was while Smith improvised a hilarious confessional rant of poverty and desperation: "Why shave when I can't think of a reason for living?", along with "Life is a sad business", quoting Greta Garbo.
The following year, Jacobs edited, co-filmed (alongside American actor Bob Flieshner), wrote, directed and co-starred (alongside Smith) in the film for which he is best known. This was the thirty-three-minute 1963 American black and white short experimental film 'Blonde Cobra'.
The short film captures Smith wearing dresses and makeup, playing with dolls, and smoking marijuana. It contains Smith droning and singing and wildly, cooing and cackling in parts of the film.
The "lonely little boy" episode about a little boy living in a large house with ten rooms has been cited as being "potentially repugnant to many viewers" because of its exploration of sadism against children and childhood sexuality.
In this episode, (his voiceover over long stretches of black leader), the narrator confesses to have "blown up the penis" of a seven-year-old boy with a match.
The film contains numerous other elements which were shocking at the time of release, such as references to necrophilia, the use of the word "cunt", the confession of a nun named Madame Nescience (impersonated by Smith in a posh, high-pitched voice) to lesbianism, the holding of a giant would-be dildo, and a portrayal of transvestites.
"Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" is then played, described as a "burlesque rendering" of German film director Robert Siodmak's ('The Killers') 1944 American Technicolor South Seas adventure/fantasy drama romance film 'Cobra Woman'.
The last scene of 'Blond Cobra' captures Smith stabbing a man in the chest.
'Blonde Cobra' has a poor rating of 3.1/10 on IMDb, but ranks in at #641 on the exhaustive list of the eight hundred and ninety-three favorite films of Martin Scorsese. The list appears on the streaming service film website MUBI.
American film historian, scholar and critic Paul Arthur writes that 'Blonde Cobra' contains "dizzying quasi-autobiographical rants" which spin on sadism, and that, like Jacobs' 'Little Stabs At Happiness', it contains "languid improvisations studded with the bare bones of narrative incident or, more accurately, its collapse".
New Zealand professor and author Hilary Radner and American media historian, professor and author Moya Luckett consider 'Blond Cobra' to be a camp portrayal of American artist, filmmaker and one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage Joseph Cornell.
This was his nineteen-minute 1936 American black and white experimental collage short film 'Rose Hobart'.
American physician, Fox News medical correspondent, columnist for several news outlets (including the New York Post and Forbes), and author Mark Sigel states that 'Blonde Cobra' is "generally considered to be one of the masterpieces of the New York underground film scene.
He also went on to say that it is a "fascinating audio-visual testament to the tragicomic performance of the inimitable Jack Smith". Sigel is also an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center.
Jacobs has long been a cinema activist. He was an integral part of Manhattan's burgeoning alternative film scene, which included venues such as the Film-Makers' Cooperative and The Bleecker Street Cinema (which notoriously premiered 'Blonde Cobra' with Smith's 'Flaming Creatures').
This also included Jacobs' own loft, where American video artist and underground film director George Kuchar ('Hold Me While I'm Naked') and his American artist, actor and underground filmmaker brother Mike first screened their 8mm work.
In 1966, Jacobs and his wife Flo founded Millennium Film Workshop, and he was a cofounder of one of the country's earliest departments of cinema at Binghamton University.
Jacobs has always been interested primarily in the act of viewing, rather than in textual decoding or analysis. As he points out, "my work is experiential, not conceptual. I want to work with experiences all the time."
In this respect, his breakthrough was the 1969 American black and white experimental film'Tom, Tom the Piper's Son'. A landmark work of appropriation, the film takes as its source material a ten-minute short from 1905.
Also in 1969, with the help of American avant-garde filmmaker and key figure in the history and development of that genre through the 1970's Larry Gottheim, and one of Gottheim's students (of whom wasJ.
Hoberman the, current senior film critic for the Village Voice), Jacobs began the Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton and taught there until 2002.
Hoberman the, current senior film critic for the Village Voice), Jacobs began the Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton and taught there until 2002.
During the course of Jacobs' two-hour film, this fragment from the dawn of cinema is subjected to extensive and varied re-photography, including manipulations of speed, light, and motion, as well as the minute examination of abstractly enlarged areas of the frame.
A masterpiece of cinematic deconstruction, 'Tom, Tom the Piper's Son' is, in its total concentration on the formal and material properties of the medium, perhaps the quintessential work of 1970s structuralist filmmaking.
It was also an indication of the direction in which Jacobs would proceed, wherein actors and narrative would fall away, replaced by a concentration on the rigorous pleasures of the cinematic unconscious.
As Jacobs had suggested, "there's already so much film. Let's draw some of it out for a deeper look, toy with it, take it into a new light with inventive and expressive projection. Freud would suggest doing so as a way to look into our minds."
'Tom, Tom the Piper's Son' is considered a landmark in avant-garde and structural filmmaking, and remains Jacobs' best-known work.
In later films such as the twenty-two-minute 1986 American black and white documentary/experimental film 'Perfect Film' and the ten-minute 1991 American documentary short film 'Opening the Nineteenth Century: 1896' Jacobs continued to explore his pioneering appropriation strategies.
His interest in performance has never waned, however, as evidenced by Nervous System, a live show incorporating two film projectors, a propeller, and individual filters through which audience members view the double image.
Writes Jacobs: "The throbbing flickering is necessary to create 'eternalisms': unfrozen slices of time, sustained movements going nowhere and unlike anything in life."
Jacobs' recent video work, such as the six-minute 1999 American silent color film 'Flo Rounds A Corner', have successfully transferred the "eternalisms" effect to the digital realm.
Jacobs' insistence on cinema as a "development of mind" can be seen, despite his protestations to the contrary, as a conceptual approach to art-making practice; one that has yielded groundbreaking work across media.
In his activism, performance, video, and film, he has consistently expanded the practice of the avant-garde moving image.
Whether undertaking archaeological journeys to the birth of cinema, or scrutinizing the interstices of new digital technologies, Jacobs' work investigates, provokes, and draws power from the mysteries of the nature of human vision.
Throughout his career, Jacobs has received numerous awards. This includes the Maya Deren Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Jacobs' films, videos and performances have received international venues such as the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Hong Kong Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the American Museum of the Moving Image, Astoria, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
He was a featured filmmaker at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2004. That same year, Jacobs wrote and directed the 2004 American black and white/color documentary/experimental film 'Star Spangled to Death'; a nearly seven-hour feature consisting largely of found footage.
The film featured Jacobs as Oscar Friendly, a Ringmaster and Janitor while Jack Smith appeared as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living.
In 2007, 'Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son' was later admitted to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress. It is part of Anthology Film Archives' "Essential Cinema" repertory.
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.
According to Jacob's personal life, he is currently married to Flo Jacobs.
Their son Azazel (b. 1972) is also a filmmaker and their daughter Nisi is a film editor and the founder and CEO of WoMen Fight AntiSemitism. Jacobs currently resides in New York City, New York.
Jacobs has been active from 1955–present.
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