"AN ARTIST AND PEDAGOGUE of powerful originality with a personality to match, Ken Jacobs saw the full equation. Like his generational peer Stan Brakhage, and such earlier nonpareils Dziga Vertov and Oscar Micheaux, he reinvented the motion picture medium to suit his interests, which extended well beyond conventional cinema: not montage, but bricolage; not film art, but film philosophy. Born in Brooklyn midway through FDR's first hundred days, Jacobs spent his childhood in Williamsburg (then a Jewish and Italian slum)."
"He graduated high school with difficulty and enlisted in the Coast Guard. Upon his return to New York, he audited onetime Berlin Dadaist Hans Richter's film class at City College (where fellow student Bob Fleischner introduced him to the filmmaker Jack Smith) and studied painting with another German expatriate artist, Hans Hofmann, first in New York and then Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met his wife and lifelong helpmate, Flo Karpf."
"Jacobs's oeuvre can be delineated in three broad periods. The first, extending from the mid-1950s into the mid-'60s, epitomizes underground cinema. Jacobs began shooting Star Spangled to Death (1957-59)-the antipatriotic title of which was once partially bleeped on a TV quiz show-with the wildly uninhibited Smith on 16 mm in 1957 (the same year filmmaker John Cassavetes initiated Shadows and author Jack Kerouac published On the Road)."
Ken Jacobs reinvented the motion picture medium through bricolage and a philosophy of film, integrating shadow plays, projection pieces, and homemade instruments including 3D devices. He was born in Brooklyn during Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term and grew up in Williamsburg. He served in the Coast Guard, audited Hans Richter's film class, and studied painting under Hans Hofmann, where he met his wife Flo Karpf. Jacobs's work spans three broad periods; the first (mid-1950s to mid-1960s) epitomizes underground cinema and includes the annotated projection piece Star Spangled to Death, which used found footage and staged scenes.
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