Ken Jacobs

American experimental filmmaker, educator and painter (b. 25 May 1933, Brooklyn, New York). Ken Jacobs is one of the pioneers of found footage in art film, renowned as the founder and director of the influential Millennium Film Workshop in New York in 1966–68. Jacobs created the Cinema Department at SUNY's Binghamton University in 1969 and taught there until 2002, earning the school's first and sole Distinguished Professor Emeritus chair in 2000. He is the father of film director Azazel Jacobs (b. 27 September 1972). Ken Jacobs began collecting found footage and editing film in 1955 while studying with Hans Hofmann (1880—1966), a famous German-American painter and one of Abstract Expressionism's founders. His sophomore short film, Blonde Cobra, came out in 1963, starring photographer, filmmaker and New York avantgarde scene "queer diva" Jack Smith; subsequently, critics hailed it as "one of the masterpieces of the New York underground film scene." Ken Jacobs produced his debut feature-length movie, Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son, in 1969, based on the eponymous 1905 film manipulated and re-edited to recontextualize the narrative. (Admitted to NFPB's "National Film Registry" in 2007, the film is considered one of the earliest examples of deconstructivism in modern cinema). In 1967, Jacobs established The Millennium Film Workshop, a nonprofit filmmaker's cooperative in New York, which provided equipment, workspace, screenings and masterclasses for free or at minimal cost to anyone (regardless of professional experience or education). In 1969, after briefly teaching at St. John's University in Jamaica, Queens, Ken Jacobs conducted a week-long guest seminar at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York. It proved so successful that students petitioned Harpur's administration to hire Jacobs full-time. With Larry Gottheim, he established the first Department of Cinema within the State University of New York's system, serving as Professor of Cinema since 1974. Jacobs began collaborating with prolific free jazz saxophonist, producer and band leader John Zorn in the 1990s, experimenting with digital video and stroboscopic/3D effects. In 2004, Ken Jacobs released a critically-acclaimed Star Spangled to Death, a six-hour film mainly consisting of found footage that took over four decades in the making.