Ken Jacobs, Alchemist

Ken Jacobs may be the most important cinema magician since George Méliès. Though he remains most famous for his groundbreaking 1969 found-footage film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and for the vital leadership role he played in the formally experimental and sexually permissive Underground cinema that flourished in New York City in the early 1960s, Jacobs has been a consistent innovator for six decades. Stretching and dilating the capacity of the projected image to enable new ways of seeing, Jacobs is one of the most important American artists— working in any medium—of the postwar period. The fact that his work is not more widely known to the public testifies not only to the continued marginalization of nonindustrial cinema practices, but to Jacobs’s own uncompromising and relentlessly anticommercial vision.

Optic Antics is the first complete volume to be dedicated to an exploration of Jacobs’s career. This eagerly awaited, richly illustrated monograph promises to expand our understanding of this indispensable artist and make his work more accessible for future generations of media students. Optic Antics is a revelation from front to back. Starting with the magnificent cover image—a photographic mise-enabyme of Ken Jacobs and his wife, and lifelong collaborator Flo, taken by fellow avant-garde filmmaker Michael Snow—the book promises to reflect Jacobs from a variety of angles. The volume benefits from the editorship of three leading scholars in the field of avant-garde cinema studies: David James, Michele Pierson, and the late Paul Arthur. They have done an excellent job of bringing together film scholars, filmmakers, visual artists, playwrights, fellow instructors, friends, and former students to meditate on the different aspects of Jacobs’s long career.

Jacobs’s contributions to film culture have included vital roles as artist, teacher, and organizer. An early champion of experimental cinema, Jacobs debuted many now classic experimental films, including the work of George and Mike Kuchar, at his loft. In 1963, he was arrested, along with Florence Karpf and Jonas Mekas, for showing Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963); the trial that ensued has become the stuff of Underground legend. Founder of the still extant Millennium Film Workshop, Jacobs helped to create a utopian, nonhierarchical space of independent, low-budget filmmaking in stark contrast to the profit-driven excesses of corporate cinema. As a professor at Binghamton University from 1969 to 2002, Jacobs’s unconventional pedagogy had a profound influence on generations of students, many of whom went on to become internationally renowned filmmakers, critics, scholars, and curators. Well balanced in its focus, Optic Antics pays homage to all of these incarnations, giving a more realistic sense of the integration of these roles in the life of the artist.

The essays are remarkably diverse in tone. Ranging from rigorous interpretations of Jacobs’s work to personal remembrances by friends, fellow filmmakers, and colleagues, the book fuses criticism with intimacy, making for a wonderfully readable volume. The book benefits from its contemporary perspective; with the exception of a fragment of Paul Arthur’s posthumously published piece, none of the essays have been printed before. Many of the artificial distinctions that marked the original reception of Jacobs’s work have collapsed, allowing for a fuller recognition of his contributions. As an artist who routinely explodes the boundaries between high and low, the present and the past, performance and cinema, Jacobs’s work demands to be thought outside of the box or, in his case, the frame. Mapping the artist’s intertexts from Busby Berkeley to Henri Bergson, Optic Antics contextualizes Jacobs’s simultaneous orientation as a constructivist, materialist, postmodern historiographer, cine-mystic, and alchemist of the moving image.

As any teacher who has shown Jacobs’s films in a classroom knows, they are remarkable pedagogical tools. Jacobs’s relentless, sensuous manipulation of the image doesn’t illustrate, but performs, complex theoretical arguments. Jacobs is also, as evidenced by the...