I Walked Into My Shortcomings

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 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 later 3D and digital innovation. Landmark works include Star Spangled to Death and Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry).

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, 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.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ The Visible Press
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 2026
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 544 pages
• ISBN: 978-0-9928377-5-4
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 240 x 170 x 34 mm