Movies: Ken Jacobs

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....

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s....

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades....

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 ...

First screened as part of Jacobs' "Nervous System" film performance, The Georgetown Loop is based on an archival film from 1903, which Jacobs pairs with its mirror double to produce a kaleidoscopic two-screen projection. The original film depicts a j...

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 ot...

The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expan...

Assisted by Nisi Ariana, 24 minutes...

A strobing deconstruction of Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight....

An experimental feature made by rephotographing the 1905 Biograph short Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son....

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 p...

Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963....

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....

A 2021 Jacobs Eternalism...

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...

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....

A 2023 Ken Jacobs Eternalism...

Ken Jacobs at a Chinese restaurant....

In Capitalism: Slavery, Jacobs uses a Victorian stereograph (a double-photograph) of slaves picking cotton under the watchful eye of a white overseer as the source for this wrenching silent work. Through digital manipulation, Jacobs creates a hauntin...

A multi-part series of Ken Jacobs' Eternalisms....