Ken Jacobs Trailers
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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.
Most Popular Ken Jacobs Trailers
Total trailers found: 275
06 September 2013
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.
01 January 1985
Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.
23 November 2013
An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
01 January 2006
Stereograph of the crowd at the opening of the US Centennial Exposition of 1893. It turns into a movie.
24 July 2011
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.
11 April 1969
An experimental feature made by rephotographing the 1905 Biograph short Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son.
03 July 1991
Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.
01 January 1975
In the backyard with the inimitable Jerry Sims. Shot in 8mm in 1975, edited and transferred to 16mm in 1987.
05 May 2020
An Eternalism film.
14 September 1976
Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.
21 May 2004
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.
16 September 1963
Little Stabs at Happiness is a collection of silent shorts Jacobs shot from the period of 1959-1963. Jaunty tunes (and a somber reflection) accompany the footage.
22 February 1986
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
14 January 2021
Part of his “Nervous System” performances, the artist’s skills as a projectionist were highlighted when he invented this specially designed system of two analytic stop-motion projectors, equipped with a spinning exterior shutter, enabling him to compare stills of found footage side by side.
11 April 2007
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.
30 January 1967
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War.
31 August 2022
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.
01 January 1994
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.
01 November 2005
A story told by director Ken Jacobs but without 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.
09 April 2023
A strobing deconstruction of Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight.
31 August 1968
Ken Jacobs’s most elusive and mysterious film is at once an allegory of movie-making, a demonstration of 8mm versatility, and a celebration of a now vanished neighborhood beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.
09 April 2011
A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.
01 January 1991
Avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs presents Buster Keaton's short silent comedy Cops (1922) as his own work by blacking-out approximately the top three-fourths or four-fifths of the frame.
01 September 2010
Sequel to Sensoriums at Sea: Dr. Toothy's New Entranceway
07 October 2011
Suggestion: Please see 'Another Occupation' before 'Seeking the Monkey King'. Contains flicker like many of my works; avoid if you have epilepsy or other unusual brain conditions.
05 February 2015
Abstract short in Jacob's current 3D style.
01 September 2007
An Eternalism 3-D film by Ken Jacobs
03 October 2010
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).
05 November 2000
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.
01 January 2011
A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.
09 September 2009
An homage to Op-Art, Brain Operations was inspired by an optical illusion produced by checkered tiles on the artist's bathroom floor.
03 March 2003
The late, legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage is the subject of this video portrait by his friends Ken Jacobs and Nisi Jacobs.
07 July 1964
An unfinished 8mm film from 1964
01 January 1963
Shot in Provincetown in the summer of '61 with the goal of funding a larger project, the film was never completed due to a violent argument between actor Jack Smith and director Ken Jacobs shortly after the shooting began.
07 September 2014
Ken Jacobs’ most recent stroboscopic work transforms a typical New York street scaffolding scene into a mesmeric, Christo-esque merry-go-round.
08 April 1963
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.
01 January 1962
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.
31 December 2007
This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form.
13 February 2014
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.
28 April 2007
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.
15 December 2011
Director Jonas Mekas travels through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars, and clubs.
18 January 2008
An adult decides to escape the pressures of life and return to his old bedroom at his parents' house.
01 September 2006
Eternalism 3-D film by Ken Jacobs
22 December 2011
An anthology of one-minute films created by 60 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema.
12 August 2019
The Nervous Magic Lantern is a projection device I came up with in the year 2000. With assistance from wife Flo (Florence) we have been performing with it ever since.
05 May 1995
Berlin documented by the US after WW2, recorded again in 1986 by Flo and Ken feigning innocence when passing by elevated train between Capitalist showroom and Communist austerity.
23 June 2017
Description by Ken Jacobs: Along the Elevated is an expanse of city architecture in delicious depth (depth is not only what things exist in, its ins and outs speak to us).
01 January 2013
"2013. USA. Directed by Ken Jacobs. With technical assistance by Nisi Jacobs. Part two of four. “Joys…began on the corner of Broadway and Spring but it was the next night waiting on Bleecker that it was understood a movie of sorts was underway, depicting a general waiting for the bus rather than one specific evening.
08 August 2008
One of Ken Jacobs' Amorous Interludes
09 September 2008
This is how the film begins, duck-on-a-leash to Little Bo Peep to the revealing of the too-busy full stage-set.
07 July 2007
A film in the Popeye Series by Ken Jacobs
06 August 1997
Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
13 August 2004
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.
09 September 2009
Ken Jacobs describes Bob Fleischner Dying: "Bob allows his sick and fading image to be caught in stereo photography.
31 December 2009
Using his trademark flicker method, Ken Jacobs pays homage to the oldest type of color film, Kodachrome (whose production was discontinued in 2009) and to Jonas Mekas, who managed to breathe life into Kodachrome.
01 January 2005
A train passes though a tunnel and hurtles on to a station. Time and space are toyed with, things enter an impossible state of ongoing movement while going nowhere.
01 September 2009
Freeview 3D film by Ken Jacobs
23 June 2017
Description by Ken Jacobs: Shelley Duvall is Olive Oyl is the fourth in a series of shorts (Popeye Sees 3D; Pappy Sees 3D, Too; Sweepea’s Favorite Eternalisms.
26 January 2011
A stroboscopic train ride along a jungle stream. Asian military men appear with their pith-helmets, keeping the ferns, trees, monkeys, natives in line.
31 August 1995
Ken Jacobs film on Rodney King and the LA Riots utilizing Pulfrich 3-D, in which a single dark filter is placed before one eye.
