MoMA Presents: Ken Jacobs’s Star Spangled to Death

In 2023 MoMA became the singular repository of the work of Ken Jacobs (1933–2025), one of the great moving-image artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, when it acquired more than 200 of his films and videos spanning more than 60 years. Now, to kick off The Whole Shebang: Celebrating Ken & Flo Jacobs, a citywide celebration of Jacobs’s work throughout the month of April, MoMA presents a weeklong run of his magnum opus, Star Spangled to Death (1957–2004). This special open-door screening allows visitors to enjoy the six-and-a-half-hour film at their leisure during the Museum’s regular opening hours.

Ken Jacobs credited his discovery of the movies to his youthful trips to MoMA in the late 1940s, recalling, “The Museum of Modern Art plunged me, when a teenager, into the unexpectedness of art.” In the decades since, MoMA has presented Jacobs’s moving-image works in nearly every context and format, from the theatrical projection of 8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and cutting-edge computer technologies of his own devising to gallery installations, Nervous System and Nervous Magic Lantern performances, and screenings in the Museum’s Sculpture Garden.

In 1955, fresh out of the Coast Guard, Jacobs bought a 16mm Bell & Howell camera and began documenting the immigrant streets and tenements of the Lower East Side and the Bowery, which reminded him of his childhood in Depression-era Williamsburg. Jacobs purposefully avoided romanticism and satire in these early works, observing of his first film ​​Orchard Street, from 1955, “I wanted to get Orchard Street, without commenting on it.” Over time, satire and lamentation became the hallmarks of Jacobs’s more political work, most devastatingly in his no-budget Star Spangled to Death, a vision of American exceptionalism, greed, and intolerance that he built from found footage (Hollywood movies, cartoons, newsreels, and TV shows), jingoistic songs, and antic performances by Jack Smith and Jerry Sims, interwoven with his own mordant prose. The filmmaker began assembling this material in 1957, expanded and updated it over the next half century, and completed it in 2004.

Organized by Joshua Siegel, Curator, Department of Film.

Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.

Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund through The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), and The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.