Ken Jacobs: The Last Interview

After radio silence lasting a full twenty years between Ken Jacobs (1933-2025) and Daniel Riccuito, the pair recorded their fractious rapprochement. 

The Chiseler hopes that you find this interview (quite possibly Ken's last) worthy of interest.  

Join me in saluting that bundle of generous, cantankerous and even malevolent contradictions: the monster I once absolutely needed in my life...

DR: I have news, Ken! Well, some very old news. Right after we stopped speaking to each other, I  bought an insane collection of VHS tapes from a dead man, a recently deceased heir who left his fortune (and vermin) to me. There are cockroach parts ground up in the plastic gears of the tapes.

KJ: Living is feeling. Maybe those reel-to-reels will be a lift.

DR:  You responded! 

I would very much like to interview you, and have definitely considered making The Chiseler a shrine to your cinema.

KJ: Shrine, twine, we need to go for a walk, sit down in City Hall Park 1 block away. The important thing is you are in motion. I like motion pictures, although the stillest picture remains in motion once in mind and some are designed to take alternate roads becoming different things, different vistas.

DR: That’s awfully nice of you, but I ask again: 

How about that interview, pal?

KJ: Love to speak with you. Expect to be attacked. Well, you’re who you are.

DR: Goodbye.

KJ: Come back, come back. Misunderstanding here. I like and admire The Chiseler. Actually am awed by it, your one-person endeavor. “You’re who you are” doesn’t sound bad to me. Relent…. 

Ken at 91 deserves a break.

Do you have an ALEXA?  Bargain of the age. Right now Annette Hanshaw is singing her repertory, amazing.

"Mean to me, why are you so mean to me?…………

“That’s all.”

DR: Cute, sir, cute. 

I’m curious, though… 

How have you been, amidst our nasty political climate?

KJ: It hurts, man. This and the real possibility that Trump walks AND Flo weak as she is has me down down down so please spare me any more bludgeons. I do understand what this costs you, a humane guy. Something I could use is an explanation why communism didn’t work. Was it Russia? with little or no experience with common decency? The surrounding ghouls?

DR: A friend and I are writing a book on Italian horror films. The idea is that they're a guilt reaction to Italy's Fascist alliance with Hitler. Sometimes dime store Freud is sufficient, yes? A scholar I know, Roberto Curti. dug my mini-proposal for the book so we shall see. I'm writing with a Scot, which is a good cross-check on my Wop sensibility. https://thechiseler.org/home/guilty

KJ: Your wop sensibility. When I was a kid in the thirties I lived in a tiny yet 3 floor house in Williamsburg, one block from the East River. We live directly in line with it now on the NY side. I could come down and exit to the Jewish street or go left to the mixed street, where I was assumed to be Italian or just accepted as a neighborhood kid. Left attracted me more, even then. It was wilder. Hadn’t known my real father and Azazel did a search years later into out blood info. Ashkinasi Jews all the way.

Flo thought me Italian the first time we met. Pushy, too. Then she saw my drawings drying on the beach and she was mine.

Italy and Hitler and Italian horror films, I appreciate what you say. The Church is irredeemably fucked up, though also responsible for some of the greatest art. I say let your sensibility go!

DR: Thanks. 

Now, may I be a noodge for a hot second? 

You’re one of those Trump-broken Democrats. What about Netanyahu, Biden and their nifty little genocide? I never hear you say boo about that. Afraid to ask: Do you absolutely hate the politics behind my latest editorial at Chez Chiz?

KJ: I guess the interview has commenced… 

Misery, miserable. Last paragraph mentions the holocaust. Every intelligent Jew grapples with the fact of the mass torture/murder that is the reality that word alludes to. And the fact that other nations did nothing when they weren’t helping it happen. Including the Arab nations, very enthusiastic. Yes, understandably; better the Jews be dead and in that punishing way, praise Allah.  

America had many Nazi enthusiasts as well as a Depression to deal with. And then an all-out war. At least, as it happened, it was with the USSR and against the Nazis but the Nazis may’ve decided that.

Better to’ve begun with the reference, though. Then some attempt might’ve been made towards a Shakespearian awareness. History comes from history. If you imagine I don’t feel for Arab children, you’re fucking crazy. But I’m out of it, safely distanced. Nothing personal to resent. I identify far more as an artist except when you in particular obsess on my Jewish roots.

DR: I never said a word on your Jewishness.

KJ: You toy with your friends, threatening to vote for Trump (even a phony name). We get it: you’re tortured. Things you accuse Biden of, rather than your reaction send me the specifics to read myself. I admire your passion, you care! Just don’t become a picturesque nut.

DR: I think you vastly (vastly!) underestimate Biden-era Fascism.

KJ: Avoid extremes. Trump is the end.No compensation unless you want hell visited on everyone. Think of those you care for.

Should you return to your senses, we can communicate.

DR: Ok. Let’s discuss your work instead. 

I’m thinking of Ontic Antics… a screening long ago… 

It was so snowy that Marilyn and I just KNEW that the Brooklyn bar and experimental film venue, Ocularis, would be dead empty. Of course it wasn't. Good vibes: festive and keenly anticipatory. I had not come prepared for a sequence that lasted for both aeons and a blink, in which Stan and Ollie became holograms in a womb struggling to get born. When the performance ended a well-meaning fellow asked you about your sanity, on the assumption that your Nervous System was a) a device for madness-making and b) that you must get kind of pazzo, since, "KEN, YOU EXPOSE YOURSELF ALL THE TIME!" 

You did not take this well and became nigh volcanic about the inability he seemed to have: "Can't you be out of control for a minute?! This is why country's go to war... Everybody has to be CERTAIN... ALL THE TIME!" But it was all greeted warmly, the performance and the Q & A. I handed you a high-quality copy of that early sci-fi talkie,  Just Imagine. You, whispering: "My favorite movie!" 

KJ: Problem. You have the memory. I’m whitewashed. You should maybe interview you. Love to read more of what you recall. I’m pursuing a kind of motion.

Movement without displacement. Hence, the walk-outs.

Not to mention the fact that the picture plane itself: a kind of brutal departure from the ongoingness of the world. Not sure what any of that means to people.

Get me?

DR: Aw, Ken. Your place in the canon is secure. 

Gotta admit, though, I’m stunned by your apparent reversal on Israel. Sorry for coming back to this subject like a dog with a bone. It’s just that I still remember the old Kenneth, who raged against Zionism. We are talking about White Settler Colonialism, no? You used to be volcanic on this subject.

KJ: Sorry to remind you but the world stood by while Jews were being methodically destroyed. Including USA with its many enthusiasts for the German mission. “Settler Colonialism” sounds bad but if there’s no place welcoming you, what does one do? One can’t isolate incidents, certainly not calamities from the rest of history. When bad things happen they make bad things happen. Israel lives among people that want it dead, true? it’s people dead.

The Greeks for their own advantage needed the Jews to get out of their way and so brilliantly concocted a story about Jews killing the Son of God! also known as God (don’t ask me). They set them up for centuries of punishment.

I’m not a religious Jew. I feel for people, for all of life, even to an understanding of disease microbes as innocent. And I figure I'm in the Jewish majority! But it’s easy to understand Jewish defensiveness; who’s asking about personal beliefsUnrecognized except for the label, you end up seeing if you can shoot first. 

You know all this. Constraining, isn’t it? Ping pong anyone?

A Trump-less world government to deal with these traffic jams!

DR: Trump again? Ok, speaking of ping-pong, I hereby give up on any future efforts to persuade you that your new, ride-or-die Democrat politics suck. Renouncing rage, hatred and the rest, I will simply focus on art. So back to your work, sir…

We both admire your cinema. Got anything I can run over at The Chiseler?

KJ: Of course you still hate! Cruelty, disrespect of other lives. I think you are a frustrated saint. Fucked up, of course. Post the following, please…
Dear one and only Daniel, some words to accompany MOVIE THAT INVITES PAUSING (just changed from FILM THAT….).

A  drawing to accompany MOVIE THAT INVITES PAUSING.  Just watched it through again, giving it more time than before.  Astonishing; it’s off on it’s own, the maker is as mystified as anyone. Hope I can make another.

Reader/adventurer: I’m looking to see this projected big, but I cannot think of it as one of my films: it is unquestionably a video and that only. There are many black frames between images and  — when projected — the projectionist is asked to stop often and on an image. Fat chance. You will meet up with the problem seeing it at home. The space bar together with the single frame advance key (bottom right) should do it.

Things happen electronically during viewing. Give it time, it feeds on time, and it goes through changes. A young Einstein might explain.

Ken Jacobs

DR: Here you go! I edited out the salutation.

https://thechiseler.org/home/movie-that-invites-pausing

KJ: Thank you, Daniel. You made me a star.

Now why can’t I cheer up?

This interview was conducted by email from April to May 2025