Ken Jacobs
Also Known As: 켄 제이콥스
Biography: 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.
Department: Directing
Place of Birth: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, USA
Adult: No
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Known For:
Scotch Tape
Overview: Shot in 1959, Scotch Tape is Jack Smith's first film -- a joyous, three-minute romp, in color, using Peter Duchin's rhumba "Carinhoso" for its soundtrack. Three young men merrily bop through the wreckage of razed buildings at the site of what would become Lincoln Center. Apparently, Scotch Tape was never edited and, instead, was cut in the camera by Smith, combining long shots and close-ups while filming mostly from overhead. The title comes from a small strip of scotch tape that was accidentally stuck on the camera and so is visible in the lower-right corner of the frame throughout the film.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1962-01-01
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Momma's Man
Overview: An adult decides to escape the pressures of life and return to his old bedroom at his parents' house.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2008-01-18
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Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
Overview: Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-07-24
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Lavender
Overview: A wholesome moment: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra, Ken Jacobs, and Flo Jacobs take lavender from a stranger's bush.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2010-06-01
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Home Movies 1971-81
Overview: Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: xx
Release Date: 1985-01-01
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Sleepless Nights Stories
Overview: Director Jonas Mekas travels through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars, and clubs. Encountering old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Mr. Mekas begins the film with the words 'I can't sleep.' Who hasn't been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day's exertions, the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, and the pensive.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-12-15
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Fragments of Paradise
Overview: For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2022-08-31
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Please Leave a Message: Anthology Film Archives Voicemails Through the Ages
Overview: This very special film features a carefully curated selection of some of the priceless messages that have graced Anthology’s voicemail system over the years. From the historically important to the utterly (and sublimely) absurd, they feature a cast of characters ranging from legendary avant-garde filmmakers, scholars, and other cultural figures to civilians whose legend has (until now) been confined to the offices of Anthology, thanks precisely to their witty, eloquent, eccentric – or in some cases unforgettably psychotic – voicemails. We’ve toyed with the idea of sharing these messages in some form for years, and the “Imageless Films” series provides a perfect pretext.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2022-09-21
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Huge Pupils
Overview: In 1968, Noren finished Huge Pupils, a gorgeous, sensuous, sexually outrageous visual study of his daily life, and part I of an ongoing series he would come to call The Adventures of the Exquisite Corpse.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: xx
Release Date: 1968-05-28
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Blonde Cobra
Overview: 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 tells the story of a woman named Madame Nescience who dreams of herself as the Mother Superior of a convent of sexual perversion.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1963-04-08
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Shorts From the Underground
Overview: Features interviews with famed underground filmmaker Ken Jacobs and associates, and screens in full (I think) two rare Jacobs works: Nissan Ariana Window, and Spaghetti Aza.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2002-09-08
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365 Day Project
Overview: This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-12-31
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As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Overview: A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2000-11-05
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He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
Overview: A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-02-22
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Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Overview: In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-04-11
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Birth of a Nation
Overview: Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-08-06
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Bill's Hat
Overview: "The whole film are non-art portraits of people in which they do what they want with this hat – and therefore, act or stand in front of my camera. It’s only love: therefore it can’t harm you". Joyce Wieland.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1967-01-01
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What Is Cinema?
Overview: Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-09-06
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Star Spangled to Death
Overview: An examination of the history of the U.S. through archival footage and contrasting views of society, incorporating audiovisual material ranging from political campaign films to animated cartoons to children’s phonograph records, featuring Al Jolson, Mickey Mouse, the young Jack Smith, and a half-dozen American presidents.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2004-05-21
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Jonas in the Desert
Overview: Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1994-01-01
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Emma's Dilemma
Overview: Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2012-06-18
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
Overview: An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-23
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Lost, Lost, Lost
Overview: Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-09-14
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Quartet Number One
Overview: Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1991-07-03
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Cinematic Correspondences: Jonas Mekas - J.L. Guerin
Overview: A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-04-09
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Santos Dumont: Pré-Cineasta?
Overview: The documentary’s starting point is the discovery and restoration of a rare and unknown photography reel reproduced from a mutoscope film, made in 1901 in London, about Santos Dumont (1873 – 1932). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: pt
Release Date: 2010-10-03
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Reminiscences of Jonas Mekas
Overview: A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2016-05-29
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Horizons
Overview: Working with Virgil’s four-part poem “Georgics” and Antonio Vivaldi’s concertos “The Four Seasons” as models, Gottheim arranged his painterly compositions into four distinct sections, each edited according to its own exacting pattern. The seasonal flux thus informs both the form and content of the image, with the basic elements of trees, sky, hills and the occasional crisscrossing clothesline filmed in every imaginable light.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1973-07-01
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Nervous Ken
Overview: In NERVOUS KEN, experimental film legend Ken Jacobs is "interviewed" by my urbane 12-year old M.C., Emma Bernstein. Envisioning an exploration of the nature of listening (of apprehending or not, remembering or not, and creating meaning) and of the repetitions & variations of verbal expression and its accompanying often-emphatic physical gesturing as a basis for making visual music, I, as filmmaker turned "media artist", employ the full range of temporal manipulation available within my concurrent digital set-up, exploiting unique corners which differentiate DV from 16mm, though including frequent references to themes & techniques from Jacobs' own work within the arcanum of film. The "musical score" is derived through permutations of the sync track. This was the first released section from the ongoing series, premiering March 2004 at the Museum of Modern Art.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2003-05-15
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