Eternalisms of the Nervous System: Ken Jacobs (1933–2025)

Ken and Flo Jacobs, photographed by Michael Snow, 1968.

Ken Jacobs, who passed away on October 5, 2025 at the age of ninety-two, was born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1933 into a working-class Jewish family. His mother died when he was seven and his father was largely absent. He later described his challenging childhood as “disastrous but typical.”1 At seventeen Jacobs joined the US Coast Guard during the Korean War and served two years in Alaska, an experience he recalled with ambivalence. Upon returning to New York, he bought a second-hand 16 mm Bell & Howell camera, an act that would shape the next seven decades of his life.

In the mid-1950s he roamed the Lower East Side with his camera, filming whenever he could afford a roll of film. Orchard Street (1955) captured the bustle of tenement life—pushcarts, gestures, passing glances. “Many stories happening in small gestures,” as he described his early work decades later after the screening of its restored digital copy at e-flux Screening Room.2 The film’s sensitivity to motion and attention to everyday vitality prefigured Jacobs’s lifelong fascination with the medium despite the fact that he was first trained as a painter. After attending Manhattan’s School of Industrial Art, in 1956–57 he studied with abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, whose dictum that flatness and depth must coexist on the canvas influenced Jacobs’s philosophy. Around this time Jacobs began collecting discarded reels of found footage—educational films, newsreels, fragments of home movies. He often remarked that the world already contained more images than we could process and that the artist’s task was to rediscover what already exists on film. Over the following decades this principle shaped much of his work with found material, culminating perhaps most recognizably in Perfect Film (1986), assembled entirely from raw television outtakes covering Malcolm X’s assassination. Aside from minor sound leveling—“My only contribution,” he said—Jacobs left the material untouched.

In the late 1950s Jacobs befriended Jack Smith, and this friendship would shape the emerging underground cinema movement in New York. Together they made Little Stabs at Happiness (1959–63) and Blonde Cobra (1963). Delirious, campy, and anarchic, these films embodied the joyous disobedience of the downtown avant-garde. Jonas Mekas soon drew Jacobs into the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, founded in 1962 as a pulsating hub for the New American Cinema. Jacobs’s early films belong to that moment’s exuberance, yet by the late 1960s he began focusing on more rigorous investigations of image and perception itself. The turning point came with Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1969–71). For this project, Jacobs took a roughly ten-minute silent short from 1905 and re-photographed it over and over, subjecting it to optical manipulations—slowing its speed, zooming into incidental details, running sequences in reverse, masking parts of the frame—to stretch what was once a simple slapstick film into an abstract, nearly two-hour study of vision. As film scholar Tom Gunning wrote about the film: “The camera really did catch it all, provided we know where and how to look.”3 Jacobs extended this inquiry in many other films, such as Soft Rain (1968), a repeated view from his loft window that turns an everyday scene into a meditation on motion and time, and The Doctor’s Dream (1978), assembled with his students from scenes of a forgotten B movie to expose a tension between surface and the illusion of depth, echoing Hofmann’s dictum that flatness and depth can and must coexist.

By the early 1970s Jacobs refused to confine his experiments to a single strip of film. Together with his wife and constant collaborator, the artist Florence (Flo) Jacobs, he developed The Nervous System, a dual-projector performance in which two 16 mm prints ran slightly out of phase, their lenses alternately masked by shutters. The result was uncanny—ghostly three-dimensional depth conjured from ordinary black-and-white footage. Presented in lofts, galleries, and festivals, these live projections turned Jacobs’s cinema into an expanded performative experiment.

A later evolution of Jacobs’s expanded cinema, The Nervous Magic Lantern, used a single projector fitted with a spinning shutter and hand-made slides, dispensing with film entirely. The flicker of pure light produced abstract colors and shapes that appeared to loom in three dimensions in front of the audience despite not being bound to any photographic image. Part optical illusion, part spiritual exercise, Nervous Magic Lantern was an apparatus for a meditation on vision itself. With its similarities to nineteenth-century phantasmagorias and 1960s psychedelic light performances, it probed how the brain constructs depth from absence: how we invent what we see.

In the 1990s Jacobs began exploring video and digital tools. From this came what he called “eternalisms”: films built from two alternating frames that, when viewed with one eye or relaxed binocular focus, generate a vivid sense of depth and vibration. He discovered the effect accidentally while recording a Nervous System performance on video, realizing that he could suspend a moment in perpetual oscillation. It is “a method of making images more real,” he said.4 However, for Jacobs 3D was never about naive realism or mere spectacle; he was interested in how it makes viewers conscious of the workings of their own perception—a waking dream of depth and duration achieved without conventional 3D glasses.

Jacobs’s aesthetic radicalism was inseparable from his politics. He saw art and activism as intertwined, and often railed against militarism, greed, and racism. Works such as Capitalism: Slavery (2006) and Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) digitally reanimated nineteenth-century stereographs so that static images of exploitation shuddered before the viewer—forcing a confrontation with the violence smoothed over by history. His commitment to democratizing the moving image took institutional form in 1966 with the founding of the Millennium Film Workshop on the Lower East Side, an artist-run space offering inexpensive equipment, workshops, and screenings. The idea was to give working-class and marginalized people the means to create their own films. Furthermore, in 1969 Jacobs and Larry Gottheim initiated the Cinema Department at Harpur College, where he became Distinguished Professor of Cinema and taught until his retirement in the early 2000s, nurturing countless experimental and independent filmmakers.

In his retirement years Jacobs continued to make art with undiminished curiosity, often asking younger collaborators to help him navigate new image-making technologies. His short “eternalisms,” often filmed in his Binghamton home or his loft, kept turning ordinary interiors into trembling fields of perception, where images of chairs, tables, paintings, and drifting dust seemed to exist on shifting planes, revealing their own construction. The 3D technique that animated Jacobs’s explorations of perception likewise became a tool for probing how images hold on to what has been lost. Two Wrenching Departures (2006) and Jonas Mekas in Kodachrome Days (2009) are among several heartfelt tributes to close friends: Bob Fleischner, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage. In these films their images hauntingly flicker in and out of visibility, as if the films were straining to keep their memories alive.

I vividly recall a post-screening discussion with Ken and Flo Jacobs at e-flux Screening Room in 2022. Ken addressed the audience with candid fervor, lamenting the terrible state of politics and the wars unfolding, yet expressing excitement about films by younger artists he had recently seen. He said he feared that humanity was nearing extinction but he took solace in the thought that “some images will definitely outlast us.”5 For me that tension—between despair and wonder—summarizes Jacobs’s ethos. Although it is tempting to call Jacobs an alchemist or magician of the moving image, his practice proves otherwise: it was always grounded in deep and critical attention to the material world. Understanding that we live amid ceaseless crises, he trusted in the power of the act of looking. As he said of his eternalist creations, the image does not repeat but “keeps happening”—the longer you look, the more the image reveals.