Description
Ken Jacobs: I Walked Into My Shortcomings
Author/Editor: Ken Jacobs; Edited by William Rose, with an introduction by J. Hoberman
CONTENTS
I Walked Into My Shortcomings is the first book to gather the writings, teachings and interviews of Ken Jacobs (1933–2025), a towering and singular figure in American art and experimental film. Spanning seven decades of creativity, these texts complement a body of work that ranges from downtown capers and reworkings of historical found footage, to groundbreaking performances of expanded cinema and radical explorations of perception and depth. They reveal an artist relentlessly committed to transforming how we engage with the moving image. In his own inimitable words, Jacobs narrates a lifetime of experimentation while offering a gritty and incisive critique of American society and its entanglements with capitalism, representation, race and ethnicity. At once personal, theoretical and political, the book captures the urgency and wit of a practice that will continue to reshape how we see and think.
What a wonder! Ken Jacobs was a masterful, thrilling, maker of moving images and a great teacher. This book is a revelation—his writing is as brilliant and expressive as his movies. (Amy Taubin, contributing editor Film Comment)
To experience the full capacity of the moving image as a contemporary artform, there’s no better place to start than the films and digital works of Ken Jacobs. He is a true visionary who has expanded the formal and expressive languages of filmmaking, and embraced the transformative possibilities of the medium. (John G. Hanhardt, former curator Whitney Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Smithsonian Museum of American Art)
If Ken Jacobs’ films are invitations to voyage, the extraordinary writings gathered here are expressways to his thinking, with his language less a vehicle than an internal combustion engine converting sentences into pure energy. They are all of a piece. Read the book! See the movies!(Tom Gunning, Professor Emeritus University of Chicago)
AUTHORS:
Ken Jacobs (1933–2025) was a New York–based artist, filmmaker and teacher. Alongside contemporaries such as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, Jacobs was at the forefront of the New American Cinema, an explosion of radical filmmaking in the 1960s epitomised by his films Little Stabs at Happiness and Blonde Cobra (both 1963), both featuring Jack Smith. A former student of painter Hans Hofmann, Jacobs introduced principles of Abstract Expressionism into cinema, treating the moving image as a site of perceptual, spatial and temporal experimentation. His prodigious output spans films, expanded cinema performances, paracinematic interventions and 3D and digital innovation. Landmark works include Star Spangled to Death (2004) and Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (1971). Jacobs started the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966 and, in 1969, co-founded the Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton, where he taught until retiring as Distinguished Professor of Cinema. He has been the subject of retrospectives at MoMA, Museum of the Moving Image, the Austrian Film Museum, International Film Festival Rotterdam and elsewhere. In 2023 MoMA acquired over 200 films and videos, forming the largest institutional repository of his work. His papers are held in the Ken and Flo Jacobs Collection at the University of Colorado Boulder.
William Rose is a UK-based curator, producer and researcher in the field of artists’ moving image.
CONTENTS:
Editor’s Notes
Acknowledgements
Introduction by J. Hoberman: What Ken Jacobs Taught Me
New York Filmmaker
The Glass Weight
Orchard Street
Interview by Tina Dickey (On Hans Hofmann)
Meeting Joseph Cornell
Body Art
Star Spangled To Death
Making and Screening Star Spangled To Death
Reese Haire
The Man Who Would Scrape Bottom
Interview by Fred Riedel (On the 1960s)
On The Human Wreckage Revue and Provincetown
Little Stabs at Happiness
Soundtrack of Little Stabs at Happiness
The Great Blonde Cobra Collaboration
Blonde Cobra
Projection Instructions for Blonde Cobra
Radio and Blonde Cobra
Soundtrack of Blonde Cobra
Baud’larian Capers at the Museum of Fine Arts
Screening Warhol
The Given Word
Interview by Donna Cameron (On 8mm Filmmaking)
The Winter Footage
The Sky Socialist
The Sky Socialist: Flight
Unpublished Letter to the Village Voice
We Stole Away
Letter to Janet Oman
Window
Children’s Art
The Limelight Restaurant
On THE BIG BLACKOUT OF ’65: Chapter One “Thirties Man”
Give Me the Moon Anytime (The Rotten Song)
Washington Vietnam March for Peace
Lisa and Joey in Connecticut, January ’65: “You’ve Come Back!” “You’re Still Here!”
Interview by Lindley Hanlon and Tony Pipolo (On Millennium Film Workshop)
Millennium Film Workshop Director’s Report
On Millennium Film Workshop
Airshaft
Letter to Stan and Jane Brakhage
On THE BIG BLACKOUT OF ’65: Chapter Four “Evoking the Mystery”
Nissan Ariana Window
Soft Rain
Third Annual Independent Film-Makers Competition
Lecture Screenings Offered by Ken Jacobs
The Evil of Andy Hardy
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son
Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son at MoMA
Beating My Tom Tom
Globe (a.k.a. Excerpt from the Russian Revolution)
Conversation with Steve Anker (On the Early 1970s)
God’s Step Children: Black Camp?
Stan Brakhage at SUNY Binghamton
Note from Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue
Programme Notes for Carnegie Institute
A GOOD NIGHT FOR THE MOVIES on WBAI
Class Tape: Introduction to Cinema
Class Tape: Film Analysis (Cinema Columbus)
Letter to the People of Broome Country
Presentation at Autobiography in the American Independent Cinema Conference
Description of Some Pieces
Seminar on Teaching Making
Interview by Lindley Hanlon
Stolen from America
A MAN’S HOME IS HIS CASTLE FILMS: The European Theater of Operations
Cinema Exultante: A Work in Pedagogic Theatre by Ken Jacobs
The Boxer Rebellion
Film Analysis (Cinema Columbus)
Jerry Takes a Back Seat, Then Passes out of the Picture
Cinema Columbu
THE IMPOSSIBLE: Chapter One “Southwark Fair”
Urban Peasants at MoMA
Interview by David Levy
FLOP: 4th of July
Interview by David Shapiro
The Movies
Wreck of the Conventional Wisdom: The Cinema That Reaches for the Moon
Promethean Cinema
On The Doctor’s Dream
Problems of Truth in Cinema
Essential Filmmaking
Some Early Black Talkies
Sound/Film
Interview by Lindley Hanlon
Studies in Cinema Art: Finding Through Feeling
Ken Jacobs at the Console Performing STICK TO YOUR CARPENTRY AND YOU
WON’T GET NAILED at McGill University
Religion in Cinema: An Enquiry
Interview by John Matturri
Entertaining Evil: The Devil in The Movies
Ken Jacobs on the Nervous System: What, Why and Wherefore
XCXHXEXRXRXIXEXSX
THE IMPOSSIBLE: Chapter Three “Hell Breaks Loose”Ken Jacobs’ Theater of Unconscionable Stupidity Presents:
CAMERA THRILLS OF THE WAR
On Ken Jacobs’ Theater of Unconscionable Stupidity Presents:
CAMERA THRILLS OF THE WAR
Letter to Stan and Jane Brakhage
Studies in Cinema and Society: Imaging War
This, Too, Shall Pass into Movies
Studio Seminar: 2 and 3D Shadow Play
Studies in Cinema and Society: Film and the Great Depression
The Whole Shebang
Hollywood and Politics
MAKING LIGHT OF HISTORY: The Philippines Adventure
On MAKING LIGHT OF HISTORY: The Philippines Adventure
Introduction to Cinema
Late Report on the Urban Peasants
Star Spangled To Death
A Consideration
Cinema Department Memorandum
Freaks: Singular Beings in Film
On Return to Oz (with Flo Jacobs)
Letter to Stan and Jane Brakhage
Apocalyptic Cinema
Perfect Film
Interview by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein
The Alps and the Jews
Class Tape: Expression and Innovation in Film and Video 1
Ronald Reagan 269
Class Tape: Ronald Reagan
Abstract Animation
Paracinema
When the Stars Began to Speak
Sick of Movies? Join Moviefans Anonymous
Class Tape: Expression and Innovation in Film and Video 2
“Social Revolution, Equality, Justice” Depicted
Routine
Interview by David Schwartz and Tom Gunning
Bob Fleischner, 1929–1989
Jack Smith, 1932–1989
Letter to David Schwartz
Two Wrenching Departures
Is Tom Gunning for Me?
The Wizard of Oz
Letter to Jonas Mekas
The Race Picture
On Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux
THE SUBCINEMA: “Better to Be Frightened Than to Be Crushed”
Chronometer
Bodies of Time
Letter to Stan and Marilyn Brakhage
Experience, History and Analysis of Cinema
Keaton’s Cops
The Child
Gender Imaging: The Myth of the Male Project
On Cape Fear
A Media Study: Motormouthing to Jonestown
Class Tape: On Sophie’s Choice
On Collaboration (Interview with Flo Jacobs)
Class Tape: Experience, History and Analysis of Cinema 1
Class Tape: Experience, History and Analysis of Cinema 2
New York Ghetto Fishmarket 1903
On Coherent and Conscious Work (with Flo Jacobs)
100 Years of Documented Love
Modest Egoists
Schindler’s List: Myth, Movie and Memory
BITEMPORAL VISION: The Sea
Letter to Stan Brakhage
3D x 3
Motormouthing to Jonestown
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL (A Flicker of Life)
Seeing Through Film
Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy
The Georgetown Loop
Disorient Express
Appeal for Collaborators
Wrong Turn into Adventure
Cinema Atlantis
Interview by Julie Hampton
Vertical X Horizontal X Depth X Time X Personality
Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy
Lulu in Hollywood
Thanks for Explaining Me: Jack Smith at P.S.1
Interview by J. Gluckstern
Acting, On Screen and In Daily Life
Cinema Amongst the High-Arts
Flo Rounds A Corner
The Guests
Pre-Code Talkies
Our Tragicomic Reflection in Movies and TV (a.k.a. Stupidity)
Crystal Palace (Chandeliers for the People)
Cinema and Society: Beyond This Commercial Interruption
(a.k.a. Advanced Stupidity)
CIRCLING ZERO: Part One, We See Absence
Tom, Tom and the Physicality of Film
A Place Where There Is No Trouble
Stan Brakhage, 1933–2003
Letter to Phil Solomon
Polemics on Ice
Interview by Edward Crouse
Cantor Film Center Programme Notes
Mountaineer Spinning
Painted Air: The Joys and Sorrows of Evanescent Cinema
Krypton Is Doomed Three Letters to Nicole Brenez on Cézanne
RAZZLE DAZZLE: The Lost World
A Reichstag Fire in New York Disturbs My Concentration
Dreams That Money Can’t Buy
On Teaching and Learning Artmaking
Cantankerous Explanation of the Nervous Magic Lantern
The Image, Finger Raised to Lips, Beckons
The Scenic Route
Failed State
Brain Operations
“The Exercise Is the Highest Form of Art” — Richard Foreman
A Time-Based Art
Gravity Is Tops
About Myself
“You Talk Too Much About Jews”
Illustrated Chronology
Technical Notes
List of Works
Index
The Visible Press, April 2026
Paperback
544 pages, with b/w images throughout
ISBN: 978-0-9928377-5-4
240 x 170 x 34 mm
