The Brooklyn Rail

“There ain’t no dark ’til something shines”
—Townes Van Zandt

Ironic that Ken Jacobs so intently pursued darkness when the lessons he shared were caught up in the fundamental materiality and transcendental possibilities of light. I recall feeling apologetic and insufficient in the face of Ken’s disappointment with the small leakage of light that New York’s old Thread Waxing Space allowed into an early-1990s screening on lower Broadway. That light undermined the total obscurity in which Ken wanted to project his film New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903 (1993). This epic, pulsating rerendering of a fragment of early Edison documentary footage highlights minute gestures of anonymous individuals (mostly immigrant, mostly Jewish) on the Lower East Side’s crowded streets. Ken’s arcane treatments impel complex narratives through extended strobing, prompting viewers to engage extra-lucidly with the film’s human figures, at once kinetic and unusually suspended in time.

That not-quite paradox of darkness and light coexisted with a parallel lifelong magicking project Ken undertook to delve beneath the surface of two-dimensional images. He sought to plumb depth perceptions along a third-dimensional z-axis, startlingly elicited through his interventions into the perceived spaces of the film’s frames. Such interventions also revealed latent fourth-dimensional temporalities—reminders of the rare, conscious sensation of time passing—while distilling dimensions of human consciousness and existence (along the way to cosmically transcendent beyonds) all produced through intimate confrontations with figures and elements in the images. It took me years to fully realize how necessary Ken’s pursuit of darkness was for the alchemical transmutations he conjured from vintage strips of seemingly pedestrian film.

The perceptual-cognitive experience that Ken induced via live manipulations of his customized two-projector Nervous System setup, and the live soundtrack performance of avant-vocalist Catherine Jauniaux that night at Thread Waxing, was part of a fundraiser for Harvestworks, an arts organization I co-directed. The Nervous System, a principal filmmaking apparatus Ken developed (there were others), commandeered multiple analytic film projectors that allowed him to stereoptically hold in place individual frames without overheating to the point of combustion. Ken’s project centered on projecting psychically-charged imagery outward—analyzing and breaking down chosen elements gleaned from a collective psyche mined from our shared cultural unconsciousness. He augmented his analytic projectors’ capabilities by ganging them together and adding stroboscopic shutters, creating mind-bending effects on both the projected images and viewers’ perception.

Ken, who at age ninety-two shuttled off this mortal coil in October 2025, was a complicated and sometimes prickly, demanding, and difficult man who maintained a vivid presence in his personal interactions through many highs and lows. Darkness of spirit was something he negotiated both in his work and in his own psyche and conversation. This could result in vented frustrations, resentments, and anger out loud. Look up, for instance, reports of the tumultuous encounter at the Flaherty Film Seminar where he screened XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX (1980). Such outbursts would overlap with his ecstatic, transcendentalist illuminations and re-figurations of human perceptions along with ideas of human life itself. (Multiple accounts of Ken’s films’ complex attributes, and their incalculable effect on others, can be found in the collected volume Optic Antics.)

Ken didn’t hold a grudge—at least not so much that he wouldn’t re-engage even with those he’d had some frictionful encounters with. In our case, we went on to work together in a further handful of shows of his work that I “produced” (weird word), and I was fortunate enough to have his supportive feedback and presence at both public and private showings of films I made with Tirtza Even (my partner at the time), including not only our films that were strongly influenced by Ken’s own work.

In the late 1990s, another apologetic insufficiency on my part occurred in relation to Ken. I’d managed to organize resources from Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Headlands Center for the Arts to bring Ken and Flo—his wife, life partner, and longtime cinematic collaborator—across the country for a series of public talks and film performances. Given that the first screening was a weekend matinee, I was under pressure to program something of general interest, if not exactly family-friendly. When I invited Ken, I’d asked him to present a version of his Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy (1997), whose actualities included—somewhat like Ghetto Fishmarket—throbbing oscillations of human figures, in this instance pratfalls on a train, taking very long minutes for the famous comedians to tumble in and out of a sleeping berth. I had a vague hope that, for all its slow-development and intense flickering—including long flirtations with abstraction—some residual pleasures of watching the familiar comics’ slapstick might captivate viewers. Due to what Ken asserted was equipment malfunction, what we got instead that day was the very abstract film Bitemporal Vision: The Sea (1994). My sense of foundering was both in failing to crowd-please—much of the audience departed mid-film (a scenario Ken was used to, but one he still felt)—as well as light-bleed (again) through the one-hundred-year-old window frames of the Headlands’s former military barracks where the screening took place.

I myself was a not infrequent decamper from Ken’s visionary battlefields. I first encountered XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX at Anthology Film Archives in early-1990s Manhattan, and while I was bowled over and gobsmacked by what he projected, I exited the small screening room repeatedly to overcome nauseating bouts of sensorial overload from its strobing imagery.

I exited, but kept coming back for more, “What? Wow! What?” In XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, a mundane, if odd (some action absurdly occurring in a tree) 1920s erotica in the French countryside became, in Ken’s Nervous System suspended animation, an opportunity to contemplate more than ginned-up sexual response. We viewers co-create constant re-narrativizations. In XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX, these include heightened awareness of the crisscross of lives with culture, commerce, and industry, intertwined with gendered understandings of desire and submission. Of course, even the least abstract freeze-frames of old footage generate Rorschach tests, especially true in Ken’s treatments. He meant for viewers’ interpretations to run rampant, spooling out speculation about motives and emotions of actors and ordinary citizens held up in mid-stride for intensive viewing.

The continuing flow of action in conventional films becomes interrupted, suspended by Ken’s Nervous System treatment—as do the pictured elements in each frame. In watching a woman’s hand flutter in a Zeno’s paradox journey toward another part of her body, we catch ourselves wondering, “What did she think she was doing? What did the cameraman think?” and, of course, “What will innumerable others seeing these images take away from them?”

Ken’s analytical, projecting approach pushes back against our cascading eras of mass psychosis, where psychoanalysis’s best efforts are woefully insufficient stopgaps against the larger tides of fascist behavior, capitalist compulsions, and other social forces that compel us beyond our own psychic projections and physical abilities. Love, loss, apprehensions of immanent yet transcendental worlds beyond surface impressions that are oppressively structured by late-modern industrial systems were fueled by the analytics he cobbled together as autodidact and DIY cultural alchemist.

Like all us angels of history, buffeted and blown backwards by violent storms of the past, Ken was caught in the stream of images produced by modern commercial reproduction technology—the mass media archetypes for human attitudes and behaviors in the twentieth century. But unlike many more innocent (or cynical) angels, rather than simply let that stream engulf him, Ken surged into active engagement with it, refashioning both medium and message to confront, extend, and subvert what it brought in its wake. He broke the code of moving images’ impact on our collective psyche throughout the long twentieth century, beginning but not ending with analyzing projection technology itself.

Wide-eyed and energetic like a child even into his tenth decade, Ken was also wise beyond his years from a young age. He took stock of and tried to reconfigure perceptions of the world as he moved through it amid troubles and tribulations. These ranged from familial disappointments (an abusive stepfather and early departure from home) to geopolitical anxieties. When Ken retired from his teaching position at SUNY Binghamton, I inherited a dozen or more boxes of his books (carried up and down the six flights to/from his walkup loft!), a large percentage of which were studies of Nazi history and—in parallel—volumes on psychosocial analysis. He never stopped returning to thoughts about the horrible things that humans did to one another—fascism, racism, capitalism—and how skewed political systems developed against the interests of large portions of humanity, while also insistently contemplating and presenting alternatives. Almost in the same breath, he highlighted the exuberant joys that could be got from even the smallest flickers of real, lived life and human imagination. A particularly vivid recollection I have of some of Ken’s nuanced, bittersweet complex of emotional engagement in any current moment suffused with remembrance was standing with him across the street from his childhood home in Williamsburg, which he’d generously agreed to revisit with Even and I for a project we were making that had been commissioned by the Jewish Museum.

Some stories he shared from his early years involved pangs of hunger. Coming away from the Queens home of eccentric artist Joseph Cornell with a borrowed copy of Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936) (a touchstone film of early appropriation from elements of a Hollywood B movie), Ken still felt the disappointment decades later that Cornell hadn’t offered young artist pilgrims any food. “We were so hungry!” Similarly, Ken told of bumping into his former teacher, abstract painter Hans Hofmann, on a New York street and trying to hide his hunger and poverty—blurting out instead to his mentor that he thought film could be the great art of the future.

That hunger of ambition and bold pronouncement fueled Ken’s willful pursuit of not simply new techniques of filmmaking or image-making but new ways of perceiving and relating to the world. He was equally a transcending visionary and a man very much of his times, fascinated with the products of Hollywood and the ephemera from the long march of moving images—newsreels, home movies, documentaries, pornography, small-scale art productions—all of which became fodder for consideration, fundamental deconstruction and re-animation.

Taking recurring prompts from his early painting studies with Hofmann in the 1950s, Ken boldly brought his own and others’ perceptions to the limits of abstraction, often surpassing them on the way to more pronounced re-engagement with the real and the felt. In the process, he charted new ways to understand being human in the modern world.

In Two Wrenching Departures (1989), using the dimension-shifting effects of his Nervous System apparatus, Ken reanimated two recently departed friends and former creative collaborators. This included the spectacular Jack Smith, star of Flaming Creatures (1963)—the screening of which briefly landed Ken in jail—as well as Blonde Cobra (1963), Ken’s early take on Jack performing, and Ken’s later Little Stabs at Happiness (1963), which revisited material featuring Jack, by then semi-estranged from Ken. In Departures, while manipulating long-before shot film of Smith cavorting wildly, ragtag, in the full glare of a gritty Lower Manhattan street, Ken transcended both the friendship’s bad feelings and mortality itself, transforming a series of dormant images. He made Jack not only live again but soar, stunningly and poignantly above those harsh, ugly streets, trailing tatterdemalion costume as street kids tagged and played along.

The numinous buoyancy Ken managed to wrest out of these little scenes—bizarre yet humble, atmospheric yet down-to-earth—takes us out of the darkness of shared spaces and dreamed visions gone awry, only partially making up for past hurts and losses. But the process of transformation itself, as well as the unbelievable images generated, signals that there is so much more to hold on to while also letting go—perceptual and affective epiphanies that illuminate even within the undeniable glooms of loss and hurt. We’ll never see the likes of Ken Jacobs again, but at least we get to keep sharing the flashes of illumination he conjured up—a light that was always eccentrically flickering, not dimly but insistently, stroboscopically—with a clarity that comes when bright light shines in enveloping darkness.