Kenneth Martin Jacobs (May 25, 1933 â October 5, 2025) was an American experimental filmmaker, artist, and teacher widely regarded as one of the foundational figures of the American avant-garde cinema.
Over a career spanning seven decades, Jacobs developed a radically original body of work that encompassed found footage manipulation, structural film, live performance, digital video, and 3D imagery.
He is best known for Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son (1969), a landmark of structural filmmaking admitted to the United States National Film Registry in 2007 , and Star Spangled to Death (2004), a nearly seven-hour found footage epic he began assembling in 1956. Film at Lincoln Center called him "The titan of American experimental cinema."
Jacobs was also a pioneering teacher who co-founded the first cinema department in the State University of New York system at Binghamton University, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in the early 2000s.
Together with his wife and lifelong collaborator Florence "Flo" Jacobs, he co-founded the Millennium Film Workshop in New York City in 1966.
In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art acquired 212 of his works, calling him "One of the great moving-image artists of the 20th and 21st centuries."
Kenneth Martin Jacobs was born on May 25, 1933, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York, to working-class Jewish parents. His mother, Janice Rosenthal â a writer and artist who published under the name "Z. Rosenthal" to obscure her gender â died when Jacobs was seven years old. He described his childhood as "disastrous but typical."
Jacobs attended high school in Brooklyn, where free admission to the Museum of Modern Art allowed him to develop an early interest in art and film.
After graduating, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard and served two years in Alaska during the Korean War era. Upon returning to New York, he audited a film class taught by Berlin Dadaist Hans Richter at City College, where a fellow student, Bob Fleischner, introduced him to the filmmaker Jack Smith.
In the mid-1950s, Jacobs began studying painting with the German-born Abstract Expressionist teacher Hans Hofmann, whose theories of depth and pictorial space would prove foundational to Jacobs's filmmaking for the rest of his life.
Jacobs later described his practice as "Abstract Expressionist cinema" in homage to Hofmann's influence.
Jacobs made his first film, Orchard Street, in 1955, a fragmented portrait of the Lower East Side thoroughfare and its inhabitants. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he embedded himself in the downtown Manhattan underground art scene, collaborating closely with Jack Smith on films that became foundational works of the American avant-garde.
These included Little Stabs at Happiness (1960), championed by Jonas Mekas as "a masterpiece of the New American Cinema," and Blonde Cobra (1963), a portrait of Smith that Jacobs described as "a look in on an exploding life, on a man of imagination suffering pre-fashionable Lower East Side deprivation."
In 1964, Jacobs, Flo Jacobs, and Jonas Mekas were among those arrested for screening Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque. The resulting obscenity trial cemented Jacobs's reputation as both a practitioner and champion of filmmaking that challenged aesthetic and legal norms. Jacobs served as a founding board member and director of the Film-Makers' Cooperative when it was established in 1962.
Florence Karpf Jacobs (1941 â June 4, 2025), known as Flo, was an artist, producer, and Ken Jacobs's closest creative collaborator across more than six decades of work. The two began their partnership around 1961 and shared a loft in Tribeca, New York, from 1966 until their deaths.
Flo appeared in several of Ken's films, most notably The Sky Socialist (1964âÂÂ1968), in which she plays a miraculously spared Anne Frank. She was an integral collaborator on Ken's Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances throughout his career. 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."
Their daughter, Nisi Ariana, is an artist and musician. Their son is the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs
Flo died on June 4, 2025. Ken died four months later, on October 5, 2025.
In 1966, Ken and Flo Jacobs co-founded the Millennium Film Workshop in New York City, along with several other artists.
Located initially in the old Third District Magistrates Courthouse on the Lower East Side â the same building that today houses Anthology Film Archives â the Workshop was conceived as a community resource providing affordable access to equipment, classes, and exhibition for artists who wished to use film outside institutional or commercial contexts. Ken described it as a "film school of the street" and a socialist enterprise
In 1969, Jacobs completed Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, a 133-minute work constructed almost entirely from a single 1905 short film of the same name directed by Billy Bitzer. Jacobs re-photographed the original film directly off the screen, subjecting it to radical analysis: slowing it down, reversing it, zooming into individual frames, and examining the grain and materiality of the image itself. The result was widely recognized as a landmark of structural filmmaking and a foundational work in the deconstruction of cinematic illusionism. Film critic Manohla Dargis wrote of the film that it "invites you to see the 1905 movie â and, by extension, cinema itself â with newly opened eyes." The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2007, for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
In 1969, Jacobs was invited to lead an experimental film seminar at what was then Harpur College at Binghamton University as part of a course taught by fellow filmmaker Larry Gottheim. The seminar proved so popular that students petitioned for Jacobs to be hired full time. He and Gottheim subsequently created the Cinema Department at Binghamton â the first in the State University of New York system to specialize in avant-garde cinema. Jacobs eventually became a Distinguished Professor of Cinema Emeritus.
His teaching method was unconventional and deeply influential. Jacobs would have films projected and stopped, reversed, and analyzed frame by frame, using the projector as an instrument of inquiry. His student J. Hoberman recalled: "I had never encountered a teacher who could talk so passionately about art, spontaneously integrating political views and childhood recollections. There were no notes." Other notable students included cartoonist Art Spiegelman and filmmaker Phil Solomon.
In the 1970s, Jacobs developed what he termed "paracinema" â a radical mode of moving image performance that extended film beyond the screen. The centerpiece of this practice was his Nervous System performances, in which two 16mm projectors running identical or near-identical footage slightly out of phase were fronted by a large propeller-like shutter that Jacobs controlled manually. The resulting images produced a form of perceived depth â what Jacobs called "eternalism" â through the rapid alternation of similar frames, creating an immersive three-dimensional effect from flat, two-dimensional material .
The Nervous System performances were developed and performed in close collaboration with Flo Jacobs. A related invention, the Nervous Magic Lantern, extended this practice further â producing moving images of light and shadow without film or electronics, which Jacobs described as "cinema without film or electronics."
Star Spangled to Death (2004) is a nearly seven-hour film that Jacobs began assembling in 1956 and completed 47 years later. The film consists largely of found footage â travelogues, cartoons, newsreels, Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech, and other fragments of American popular culture â interspersed with live performance footage shot by Jacobs in the early 1960s, starring Jack Smith as "The Spirit Not of Life But of Living" and Jerry Sims as "Suffering."
Jacobs described it as "a social critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold-out America." An anti-Trump prologue was added in 2020.
In the 1990s, Jacobs embraced digital video and began a decades-long series of audiovisual experiments he called Eternalisms, in which two-dimensional images â historical photographs, early cinema footage, paintings â were rendered three-dimensional through a computational process that simulated the depth effects of his Nervous System work. He collaborated on several Eternalism works with composer John Zorn, including the Celestial Subway Lines series (2002âÂÂ2003)
Notable later works include The Georgetown Loop (1996), Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World (2007), Joan Mitchell: Departures (2018), and CYCLOPEAN 3D: Life with a Beautiful Woman (2012).
His final credited film was XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (2022), a collaboration with Flo. He was working on new Eternalisms on the day he was admitted to the hospital.
In 2021, Ken and Flo Jacobs donated their personal and professional archive to the University of Colorado Boulder's Rare and Distinctive Collections (RaD) at the University Libraries. The Ken and Flo Jacobs Collection â spanning 87 linear feet of material including correspondence, production documents, grant applications, oral history interviews, teaching materials, and sound and video recordings â was described by CU Boulder as "a monumental cornerstone collection" for the study of experimental film.
The acquisition was supported by the W. H. Donner Foundation. In October 2023, the Brakhage Center for Media Arts hosted a two-day symposium, Living Archive, Living Cinema: Processing the Work of Ken and Flo Jacobs, to inaugurate the collection, featuring Azazel Jacobs, Andrew Lampert, and MoMA film curator Josh Siegel.
In 2023, the Museum of Modern Art acquired 212 of Jacobs's works â one of the largest single-artist acquisitions in the museum's history â calling him "one of the great moving-image artists of the 20th and 21st centuries."
His work has been exhibited at the Berlin Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and institutions internationally.
The book Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford University Press) collects critical writing on his work across his career.
Jacobs's influence extended into mainstream American cinema. Josh Safdie's 2025 film Marty Supreme, starring Timothée Chalamet, cited Jacobs's 1955 debut film Orchard Street as a central visual and research reference. Production designer Jack Fisk described Orchard Street as the document that became "a nucleus for the look of the film."
Following Jacobs's death, a series of international tributes recognized his legacy. At the 76th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2026, the Forum Expanded section screened Let There Be Whistleblowers (2005/2007) â a short film co-directed by Ken and Flo Jacobs, set to Steve Reich's Drumming, and assisted by their daughter Nisi Ariana â explicitly in their memory.
In March 2026, the Open City Documentary Festival and the Barbican in London presented Seeing Through Film: Ken and Flo Jacobs, a retrospective celebrating their work and lives.
In April 2026, a month-long citywide celebration titled The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken & Flo Jacobs â An Expanded Cinema(s) Salute took place across fourteen venues in New York City, including the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, Film at Lincoln Center, Metrograph, BAM Cinema, the Museum of the Moving Image, Light Industry, UnionDocs, Spectacle Theater, and the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Organized by Andrew Lampert, the events ran throughout April 2026.
Coinciding with the salute, Vanishing Press published I Walked Into My Shortcomings, the first book to gather Jacobs's writings, teachings, and interviews, spanning seven decades of creativity.
Jacobs met Florence Karpf around 1961 and the two were partners in life and work until her death on June 4, 2025. They had two children: filmmaker Azazel Jacobs (Momma's Man, 2008; His Three Daughters, 2024) and artist and musician Nisi Ariana.
Ken and Flo's Tribeca loft was the setting for Azazel Jacobs's film Momma's Man, in which both Ken and Flo appeared as fictionalized versions of themselves.
Ken Jacobs died of kidney failure at a hospital in Manhattan on October 5, 2025, at the age of 92, four months after the death of Flo. His son Azazel said: "While the official cause of death was kidney failure, life without his collaborator and partner since 1960 was unimaginable for so many, especially him."