Ken Jacobs, a force in New York’s underground film world, dies at 92

07 October 2025

Ken Jacobs, right, and his wife Flo on the set of Momma’s Man, the 2008 film directed by their son Azazel. Photograph: ThinkFilm/Everett/Shutterstock

Ken Jacobs, a towering figure of the American avant-garde and one of New York’s most prolific experimental filmmakers, has died at the age of 92 from kidney failure, leaving behind a profound legacy that helped define the contours of underground cinema. Born in 1933 in Brooklyn, Jacobs immersed himself in art and cinema from a young age, eventually becoming a guiding light to countless artists and a central figure in film communities that pushed back against mainstream narrative norms.

From his early days, Jacobs sought to expand what moving images could do. After dropping out of art school and serving in the Coast Guard, he studied painting under Hans Hofmann an experience that sharpened his visual instincts. His early work included Orchard Street (1955), an impressionistic urban portrait of Lower East Side life, which already showed his interest in fragmented stories, fleeting gestures, and layering.

But Jacobs’ most enduring reputation rests on his radical reworking of archival material. In Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969) he took a silent film originally shot in 1905 and transformed it into a hallucinatory meditation: slowing, cropping, looping, reframing, and reprojecting elements to uncover hidden textures and invisible rhythms in the old material. The result had no linear narrative. It was a kind of cinematic archaeology, a way of reading history, spectatorship, memory, and vision. The film was later inducted into the U.S. National Film Registry, affirming its canonical importance.

Alongside Tom, Tom, Jacobs’s early works such as Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra captured the pulsating energy of the New York underground scene. Collaborating with figures like Jack Smith, Jacobs blurred the lines between art, performance, and cinema, often leaning into humor, disjunction, lyricism, and provocation. Blonde Cobra, for example, plays with camp, play, and fragmentation Jacobs and Smith destabilize expectations through collage and performative excess.

In 1966 Jacobs co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, an artist-driven distribution system that gave noncommercial cinema a lifeline, and he became the first director of the Millennium Film Workshop, a space for filmmakers to explore expanded image forms. These institutions were not ancillary to his practice they were its infrastructure. Jacobs believed in supporting other filmmakers, creating forums for exchange, screening, experimentation, and collective growth.

Over the years he remained active and adventurous. Jacobs embraced new technologies and conceptual projects. He experimented with double projections, a “Nervous Magic Lantern,” and later patented an “eternalism” device to push depth and temporality in moving images. He was never content to rest on his reputation. In 2004 he released Star Spangled to Death, a sprawling, nearly seven-hour film woven from archive footage he had collected since the 1950s, a critical and poetic collage of Americana.

Jacobs also taught film at institutions including Binghamton University, shaping generations of filmmakers who absorbed both his methods and his ethos. His collaborative life with his wife, Flo Jacobs, who died earlier in 2025, was central. The two worked like “two painters seeing what was possible in showing film in unexpected ways,” as Jacobs once reflected. His passing so soon after hers adds a layer of poignancy to the end of an era in experimental film.

To those who knew him, Jacobs was both generous and exacting an agitator of perception, a mentor, an instigator, a filmmaker whose work could unmoor certainties about time, image, and expectation. His films ask us to linger, to see sideways, to hear what lies in the flicker, to feel the camera itself becoming part of a world in flux.

In mourning Jacobs we mourn a guide through cinema’s hidden territories. The New York underground that he helped nurture was never about what was polished or safe. It was about edges, collisions, cracks, and possibility. His voice remains in imperfect, vibrant loops of light and shadow.