#experimental-cinema

#experimental-cinema

Ken Jacobs was born in Brooklyn on May 25, 1933, to divorced parents. His mother, an artist, died when he was seven, leaving his father, a former minor league baseball player, to raise him. Jacobs graduated from the City University of New York and, following a two-year stint in the Coast Guard, briefly studied painting under Hans Hofmann. A frequent attendee of Cinema 16, which regularly showed avant-garde works, he turned his Modernist-trained eye toward creating what he would describe as 'Abstract Expressionist cinema.'

Appearing in 1974, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde invented a tradition and created a history for a field that was generally regarded, except by a few zealots, as an obscure backwater. Visionary Film opens with founding mother Maya Deren, goes on to explicate her heirs Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, ruminates on the radical nature of underground movies and Harry Smith's arcane animations, and concludes with a formalist tendency the author himself had identified several years before and named "Structural Film."