By Henry Flesh

Sarah Jacobson (1971-2004)
A maverick film voice falls silent.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, I watched the videotape of Sarah Jacobson’s 1993 film I Was a Teenage Serial Killer and found it just as raw and exciting as it had originally been described to me. I was particularly impressed by a remarkable scene in which Sarah’s heroine shoots a man who has angered her, one that includes numerous close-ups of bullets ripping through his bloodied chest as he lies on his back. It’s the perfect, indelibly stylized representation of a sort of angry, punk feminism that was so prevalent in those days.

That night, I attended a screening of Monster, featuring Charlize Theron’s powerful portrayal of prostitute-serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Astonishingly, the images I’d seen only hours earlier in Sarah’s film were here as well: There was Theron’s Wuornos shooting one of her johns point-blank in the chest, glaring over him as he laid in the dirt near his parked car. Surely, I thought, Monster’s director, Patty Jenkins, must know Sarah’s work.

But this was not the only Sarah Jacobson coincidence I experienced last month. Weeks before I saw the two films, I was a patient in St. Vincent’s Hospital being treated for non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a disease that struck me suddenly and without warning. I learned shortly thereafter that 32-year-old Sarah was in St. Vincent’s at the same time, fighting a uterine cancer that had spread to her pelvic bone, a cancer that had not been detected by her doctor at an earlier, more treatable stage.

Although I was released from the hospital and she was moved to a hospice at Beth Israel, we had experienced many of the same traumas: invasive treatments, endless rounds of chemotherapy, demeaning encounters with some doctors and nurses and that soul-destroying sense of powerlessness that can overwhelm even the strongest during a prolonged hospital stay. Sarah is a filmmaker; I am a novelist. We were both watching our artistic ambitions—to which we’d devoted our lives—overwhelmed by life-threatening disease at an unexpected age.

Sarah’s spirit and essence seep from her work; they seem to breathe in each frame of her films. When I visited her at Beth Israel, she described films as liberation; salvation came after her high school years when she’d felt geeky and unpopular.

"I was a liberal Democrat growing up in Edina, Minnesota," she told me, "and that is a very conservative, Republican town. Of course I was alienated."

She was introduced to what she calls "cool" movies by the tv program Night Flight, which presented a series of independent films from New York filmmakers—movies like Stranger than Paradise, She’s Gotta Have It and Susan Seidelman’s Smithereens. The last, in particular, inspired Sarah, since it had been directed by a woman, something rare in both Hollywood and independent movies.

"I decided then that I wanted to make films in which women didn’t get killed, raped or married—cool films about cool women."

She was also discovering the indie rock scene in nearby Minneapolis.

"I met kids in those places who were more accepting of me, at least when I compared them to the people I knew at school."

Unfortunately, the sexism she found elsewhere was just as ubiquitous at these clubs, disguised though it was by the "hip" progressive veneer assumed by many male rockers. For instance, in bands composed only of men, "I always felt like I had to fuck them or something." She befriended the girl bands and found a new circle of friends.

In the early 90s she attended the San Francisco Art Institute, and it was there that she met her instructor, legendary underground filmmaker George Kuchar, "the Movie King of Trash" who was "the first filmmaker who was nice to me." It was Kuchar who told her that when it came to movies she should do whatever she wanted, rather than follow any preconceived precepts. Under his guidance, she made I Was a Teenage Serial Killer, which the institute’s film department refused to show at the year-end student showcase. According to Sarah, "They hated the B-movie esthetic combined with the militant feminism."

Inspired by indie record labels Dischord and K, she decided to distribute her films via mail order. She was very aggressive in her marketing strategies—sending review copies to her favorite magazines and maintaining a database of anyone who ever ordered a film.

With more experience and confidence, she was ready to make a feature. She wrote and shot Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore about a high school girl experiencing problems with chauvinistic male attitudes while dealing with her own emerging sexuality. It’s hard to forget the opening shot: a man’s bare butt thrashing about as he lies on top of a woman, clumsily deflowering her in a deserted cemetery. When he turns over after a thoroughly unsatisfying fuck, the audience is treated to what is surely one of the most unflattering full-frontal nude shots in film history.

Moments like these helped give Sarah her reputation as the "Queen of Underground Cinema."

She raised money for this film just as aggressively as she had promoted her earlier ones, hitting up everyone on her mailing list for anything they could spare. Kim Gordon and director Tamra Davis invested, and Sarah was also awarded a $3,000 grant. In the end she made the film for a miniscule $50,000, and it went on to open the 1996 Chicago Underground Film Festival and then play at Sundance.

Around that time, though, she lost her producer. She asked her mother, Ruth Jacobson, for help, since Ruth had an extensive background in sales and marketing. A tireless and energetic team, the new team traveled the world, booking Mary Jane in as many cities, countries and film festivals as they could.

It’s hard to imagine Sarah’s energy stilled, even for a moment. She had several ideas for movies, including a completed screenplay, Sleaze, about an all-girl band confronting women’s issues while attempting to cope with the whole indie scene. I can’t help but compare the frustration Sarah must have felt in the hospice with the way I felt when I was hospitalized, right after I’d just completed two-thirds of a new novel. Sarah’s spirits, however, were lifted by an upcoming retrospective of her work to be held at the Pioneer Theater. It prompted her "to get to work and fight my ass off every day."

Helping her with her struggle were her mother, her sister Lee Jacobson and her boyfriend, Aaron Zisman, who were usually with her in the hospice. When Sarah lost most of her hair during chemotherapy, she and Aaron gave each other mohawks, a process that Sarah filmed for a movie entitled True Love Mohawk.

"I’d never been able to have love in my life before," she told me, "because everything had seemed so vicious. I’d always wondered, ‘Why not me?’ But now, suddenly having cancer has taught me so much. To be able to feel love while going through this horrible experience."

She stopped, grasping for words, then closed her eyes. Aaron took hold of her hand.