Ken Jacobs

An epic film costing hundreds of dollars! An antic hurdle-course collage combining found-film materials with my own more-or-less staged filming. It is a social-critique picturing a stolen and dangerously sold-out America, allowing examples of popular culture to self-indict. (Anthology Film Archives)

After a presentation of the 1905 short, the film spends two hours playing back the footage in various ways, highlighting and distorting many of the images.

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 (in drag) tells the story of a woman (Madame Nescience) who dreams of herself as the mother superior of a convent of sexual perversion. (imdb)

It consists of 4 parts in which a single or a pair of characters slowly move around a space, interacting with various things (balloons, cigarettes, cups) found in the space or on their person, and posing for the camera.

An antique stereograph image of cotton-pickers, computer-animated to present the scene in an active depth even to single-eyed viewers. Silent, mournful, brief. --Ken Jacobs (Ken Jacobs)

Window is a movie that shows us what we usually see when we look through a window (like the title 'suggests'). (imdb)

Ken Jacobs, now in his 70s, might be the most radical U.S. filmmaker working today. Seeking the Monkey King, his most acclaimed and bracing film in recent years, offers a visionary lamentation about the state of America today. The film unleashes tremendous energy as a clamorous collage soundtrack (by the equally adventurous musician J. G. Thirlwell) plays overtop of a roiling abstract landscape, punctuated by Jacobs's topical, outraged intertitles ranting about American greed and corruption.

In Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise its story is told by director Ken Jacobs but without the 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. This is accompanied by industrial sound and music provided by John Zorn and Ikue Mori. (imdb)

Ken Jacobs' most recent stroboscopic work transforms a typical New York street scaffolding scene into a mesmeric, Christo-esque merry-go-round.

Found footage on Malcolm X's death.

Originally photographed in 1903, US Library of Congress collection. New arrangement in 1996 by Ken Jacobs, assisted by Florence Jacobs. 35mm optical rephotography by Sam Bush, Western Cine, Denver. (youtube.com)

Jolting in every sense of the word, this short masterwork flickers between stereographic cards depicting Victorian-era child laborers, creating a portrait of standardized horrors, endlessly reproduced. (mubi.com)

The image on the screen flickers unsteadily; the rhythm is unsettling: black/white, black/white, white/black. The film cuts abruptly to a playground. Color appears, sound sets in. Children crawl in the sand, adults watch over them, sitting on benches. It turns abstract. At the end a circle appears on the screen, again flickering strongly, like a beating heart. This is "Incendiary Cinema." (rateyourmusic)

Companion to The Georgetown Loop.

A reworking of 10 seconds from Entrée d`une noce à l`église (Entrance of a wedding at the church), the 1896 Lumiere brothers film. As the line of wedding guests advance slowly, the adjacent frames, one to each eye, join to create an irrational and impossible 3-D. Silent film, avant-garde, and digital 3D: 120 years of film history merging into one single cinematic event.

A short by Ken Jacobs. Taormina, Sicily; Mt. Etna erupting nearby.

Using his trademark flicker method, Ken Jacobs pays homage to the oldest brand of color film, Kodak (whose production was discontinued in 2009) and to Jonas Mekas, who managed to breathe life into Kodak. (imdb)

Poetic riff on the transformation of his classic film ''Tom Tom the Piper's Son'' from chemical to electronic form during the telecine process.

Silent film depicting footage of a stretch along Orchard Street in New York City between Houston and Delancey Streets. Two edits of the short exist: a 12-minute (1955) and a 27-minute (2014) version.

This work is a demonstration of one of Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern performances, which are created with a hand-manipulated projector and use neither film nor video. Highly stroboscopic and hallucinatory, these kinetic performances result in otherworldly spaces and plays of near-abstraction and suggestive imagery. Mountaineer Spinning features an evocative musical score. This work highlights Jacobs' relentless experimentation with the very fabric of projected light. (Letterboxd)

In the backyard with the inimitable Jerry Sims. Shot in 8mm in 1975, edited and transferred to 16mm in 1987.

RAZZLE DAZZLE is an early Edison shot cut off at its head and tail and along its four sides from the continuity of events like any camera-shot from a bygone day; no, like any camera-shot, immediately producing an abstraction. This abstraction pictures a great spinning maypole-like device lined with young passengers dipping and lifting as it circles through space. They look out - from their place at the start of the 20th century - with a remarkable variety of expressions, giddy to pensive.

An erratic and experimental short film by Ken Jacobs.