
Directing
Community Rating
6.0
TMDB estimate
Born
May 25, 1933
Died
October 5, 2025 (age 92)
Born in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, USA
A pioneer of the American film avant-garde of the 1960s and '70s, Ken 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. A New Yorker by birth, Jacobs graduated from City University to find himself in the midst of the downtown art scene of the 1960s, which included artists Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and the experimental theater troupes of Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer. Although Jacobs had studied painting with Hans Hoffman, he quickly gravitated to film, finding kindred spirits in radical filmmakers such as Jonas Mekas and Hollis Frampton. An early friendship with Jack Smith yielded several collaborations, including the seminal underground films Blonde Cobra (which Jonas Mekas dubbed "the masterpiece of Baudelairean cinema") and Little Stabs at Happiness, as well as a Provincetown beach-based live show, The Human Wreckage Review.

Sky Dive
as Director
TBA

Depth for One Eye or Two
as Director
TBA

Spotted Fever
as Director
TBA

Downtown Loft with Skylights
as Director
2026
A Date with Shirley
as Director
2026

BOOK OF ETERNALISMS 43
as Director
2026

BOOK OF ETERNALISMS 41
as Director
2026

BOOK OF ETERNALISMS 42
as Director
2026

BOOK OF ETERNALISMS 40
as Director
2025

Book of Eternalisms 39
as Director
2025

Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse
as Self
2025
BMT
as Director
2025
Tourists of the Familiar 70
as Director
2024

Ken Jacobs - from Orchard Street to the Museum of Modern Art
as Self
2023
For James Otis
as Director
2023

Art-House America: Austin Film Society
as Self
2023

Up the Illusion
as Director
2023

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
as Director
2023

Writhing City
as Director
2023

From Introduction to Orson Welles’s Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight
as Director
2023