Ken Jacobs
Yönetmen · 1933 – 2025 · Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York, USA
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.
Filmler16
Film7.3BelgeselAlso known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1968 · 32 votes
Film7.8BelgeselA 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.
Film8.2BelgeselExplores the life and career of cartoonist Art Spiegelman including the creation and ground-breaking impact of his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel MAUS.
Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse
2025 · 4 votes
Film7.0BelgeselJonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Birth of a Nation
1997 · 4 votes
Film6.4BelgeselNot 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.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.
Jonas in the Desert
1994 · 5 votes
Film8.4BelgeselA film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
1986 · 10 votes
Film6.5BelgeselFor 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. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.
Fragments of Paradise
2022 · 4 votes
Film6.4BelgeselUsing 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.
What Is Cinema?
2013 · 25 votes
Film6.8BelgeselExperimental 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.
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
2011 · 12 votes
Film6.7BelgeselIn 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. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
2007 · 10 votes
FilmA “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.
Film7.1BelgeselWalden, Mekas’ın ilk günlük filmi olabilir, ancak Mekas’ın en eski görüntülerini birleştiren film, savaş sonrası Amerika’ya geliş hikayesini anlatan filmdi, Lost Lost Lost.
Film5.0BelgeselThe 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). The work approaches historic and artistic aspects from the beginning of Cinema (pre cinema, variety film) and a cinema that appropriates archive material (found footage, recycled films), through interviews, documents, visual metaphors and the articulation of a poetic essay.
Santos Dumont: Pré-Cineasta?
2010 · 1 votes
Film3.0A 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.
Blonde Cobra
1963 · 41 votes
Film5.3BelgeselUnable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.
Sleepless Nights Stories
2011 · 7 votes
Film6.2DramGençlik hayallerini gerçekleştiremeden, yani bir anlamda ‘kendini gerçekleştiremeden’ aile kurmuş, yetişkin olmuş/olmak zorunda kalmış bir adamdır Mikey. Amerikan Sineması’nın en önemli yönetmenlerinden biri olan ve daha çok avangard çalışmaları ile bilinen Ken Jacobs’ın oğlu olan yönetmen Azazel Jacobs kendi ailesini ve evini koruyarak/kullanarak aile evine dönen orta yaşlı bir adamın traji komik hikâyesini anlatıyor. Karısı ve bebeği ile sakin bir hayat süren Mikey bir iş toplantısı için ailesinin New York’taki evine kalmaya geliyor. Fakat bu kısa ziyaret Mikey’in aile evinin rahatına alışıp kendini çocukluk eşyalarının çekimine kaptırmasıyla uzamaya başlıyor. Bu evden ayrılamama durumunu kimseyle paylaşmayan Mikey, yavaş yavaş 'evin çocuğu' kimliğine yeniden alışmaya başlıyor.