NOW PLAYING: Ken Jacobs' CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
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FILMMAKER KEN JACOBS.
KEN AND FLO JACOBS, APPEARING IN CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN.
Gartenberg Media Enterprises mourns the loss of legendary filmmaker Ken Jacobs, who passed away on October 5th, 2025, at the age of 92. A founding member of The Film-Makers' Cooperative, Millennium Film Workshop, and the Film Department at Binghamton University, Jacobs was a titan of the New York and global avant-garde filmmaking community for over 60 years.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jacobs studied with abstract expressionist painter Hans Hofmann, whose emphasis on depth and dimensionality had a significant impact on Jacobs’ work as a filmmaker. As noted by Amy Taubin in Artforum: “Hofmann’s injunction to ‘manifest a three-dimensional event on a two-dimensional surface’ has been, formally, the point of departure for all of Jacobs’ moving-image work [and his] desire to up the ante on the illusionary three-dimensionality of movies to create images that are as head-butting and immersive as they are ephemeral.”
Jacobs began shooting anarchic and politically astute theatrics in the streets of his native city in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period, he closely collaborated with filmmaker and performer Jack Smith, who acted in Jacobs' films WHIRLED (1961), BLONDE COBRA and LITTLE STABS AT HAPPINESS (both 1963). In 1964, Jacobs, his wife Flo, and Jonas Mekas were among the organizers arrested for screening Smith's transgressive queer classic FLAMING CREATURES (1963) at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque. The resulting trial — which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and catalyzed an impassioned response from the global art community — cemented Jacobs’ reputation as both a practitioner and champion of filmmaking that challenged the status quo and pushed the boundaries of the medium in both content and form.
Jacobs' best-known work, the 1969 found footage feature TOM, TOM, THE PIPER’S SON, is a meticulous experiment in re-photography that is now widely regarded as a landmark work of structural filmmaking. In the 1970s, Jacobs defined what he termed “paracinema,” a radical mode of moving image performance that included his Nervous System Performances: transformative film experiences that use two simultaneous 16mm projectors and a variety of live sound and music to explore audiovisual dimensions hidden within the film strip. As noted by Jon Gartenberg in an essay for the Guggenheim exhibition The Variable Media Approach: Permanence Through Change:
Jacobs’ Nervous System performances most vibrantly express both the reproducible and the performative aspects of the variable media paradigm. In these works, he overlaps the projection from two side-by-side projectors of virtually identical frames of film onto a single screen. The resulting, slightly asynchronous images appear to move over and under one another, and back and forth in depth. This unique process, controlled manually by Jacobs’ hand, exploits the perceptual space between the flat surface of the screen and volumetric space, a kind of ‘2½-D,’ as noted by the artist. Thus, beginning with the concrete materiality of the film stock, which he then manipulates through mechanical means, Jacobs moves the spectator’s experience into an ephemeral, immaterial world.
Beginning in the 1990s, Jacobs began experimenting with stroboscopic and 3D effects, as well as digital video. His lifelong fascination with emergent audiovisual technology culminated in the creation of CYCLOPEAN 3D: LIFE WITH A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, which was produced by Gartenberg Media Enterprises in 2012 through the Experimental Filmmakers Production Fund. Jon Gartenberg later presented CYCLOPEAN 3D at the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. In CYCLOPEAN 3D, Jacobs created a new kind of home movie, in which he mined his own archive of stereoscopic still images of family and friends taken between the late 1960s and 1975, and re-presented them as 3D time-based portraits. In addition to Jacobs’ family (his wife Flo and their children Azazel and Nisi), Jacobs also included images of such fellow avant-garde luminaries as Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Ernie Gehr, Stan Brakhage, Richard Foreman, and Amy Taubin. Jon Gartenberg remarks: “For me, CYCLOPEAN 3D is the most directly autobiographical film by Ken, because it is a collage of his friends and family over an extended period of time. The film is also a love letter to Flo Jacobs (who passed away earlier this year), as Ken ends the film with the final title card: We got together in 1961, two weeks before Flo’s 20th birthday. Therefore, in homage to both Ken and Flo, we would like to offer this film for viewing this month in the Adrienne Mancia Streaming Room.”