Art-House Filmmaker Ken Jacobs Has Died

Director Ken Jacobs has died. He was 92 years old.

His son, award winning filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, told the New York Times that his legendary father died of kidney failure at a hospital in Manhattan.

The experimental, avant-garde filmmaker was best known for his inventive uses of found footage over the course of his 65-year career.

Notably, his 1969 film Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son is considered a landmark of experimental cinema and the first major example of deconstruction in film. It takes footage from a 1905 short film of the same name and chops up the film in different ways by freezing, rewinding, or zooming in on various details of the film to tell an entirely new story. It was inducted into the United States National Film Registry in 2007.

Another groundbreaking work made by Jacobs was Star Spangled to Death, a seven-hour long experimental documentary that details the decline of American society. The film is made entirely of archival footage that Jacobs began compiling all the way back in 1957. It took him 47 years to complete, until the film was released in 2004.

His son Azazel is also an accomplished filmmaker, with his film His Three Daughters starring Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen named as one of the top ten independent movies of 2024 by the National Board of Review. It was released on Netflix last last year.