Ken Jacobs, a renowned experimental filmmaker who founded Binghamton University’s Cinema Department, passed away on Oct. 5. He was 92 years old.

Jacobs taught in the department from 1969 until 2003 and was ultimately designated as a SUNY distinguished professor emeritus.

“Ken Jacobs was an iconic artist and teacher,” Ariana Gerstein, a professor and graduate director of cinema who studied under Jacobs, wrote in an email to Pipe Dream. “He is one of those professors who former students love to share stories about long after graduation. He was a huge influence on many — in both production and studies.”

“His classes were transformative for many students, including myself, when I was a student here,” Gerstein continued. “A lot of us either never considered making films before taking his classes, or at least had our understanding of what filmmaking could be radically altered.”

Before he began filmmaking, Jacobs, born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, studied art under Hans Hofmann, a distinguished German American artist that greatly influenced the Abstract Expressionist movement in the mid-1950s.

As founder of the Millennium Film Workshop, Jacobs was part of building New York’s underground film scene in the 1960s. The workshop is a nonprofit media arts center dedicated to avant-garde and experiential cinema that continues to make film production accessible. Later on, he began teaching large classes at St. John’s University in Queens.

In 1969, Jacobs visited the University to teach a weeklong seminar. Students quickly petitioned administrators to hire Jacobs as a teacher. Jacobs was hired and co-founded SUNY’s first cinema department along with Larry Gottheim, another experimental filmmaker and professor emeritus.

Notable students of Jacobs include cartoonist Art Spiegelman, creator of the graphic novel “Maus” and the son of a Holocaust survivor, and film critic J. Hoberman ‘71.

“The thing about this department is you can’t necessarily name a particular room or class or moment that you can tie specifically to Ken Jacobs,” Andrea Gyenge, an assistant professor of cinema, told Pipe Dream. “It’s more like Ken Jacobs is in the structure of the walls here. It’s in the air that we breathe.”

The Cinema Department plans to hold a memorial screening in the spring semester as part of a series honoring Tomonari Nishikawa, Ralph Hocking and Vincent Grenier — other influential faculty who have died in the past two years.

Jacobs received numerous awards, including the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant, and he has performed at both the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Jacobs is survived by his two children: son Azazel, a filmmaker, and daughter Nisi Ariana, an artist.

“He was intractable as he challenged his students to find and live in alternative states with an insubordinate imagination and intellectual audacity,” Don Boros, a former professor of theatre at the University, wrote in an email. “But he also guided them to find their own worlds and techniques and play with them fearlessly. He was demanding, maddening, and goading with a passion that produced some remarkable results.”

“Even though it was a time when all of the programs in the arts and creative writing were breaking the rules, Ken was still the maverick,” he continued.