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Returning from the days gone by.—Jonas Mekas, “Ninth Idyll: Past Villages Over the Plains Flow the Rivers,” Idylls of Semeniskiai (1948) (wait until I publish my diaries…)—Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal, The Village Voice, January 2, 1969. 1. Jonas Mekas. Jonas Mekas. Jonas Mekas. The life. The life. The life. The I. The eye. The aye.
Jonas Mekas (/ ˈ m iː k ɑː s /; [1] Lithuanian: [ˈjonɐs ˈmækɐs]; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". [2]
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in the farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Elmshorn, Germany. After the War he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. At the end of 1949 the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York City, where they ...
- Midwife of The New York Independent Cinema
- Jonas Mekas, “Filmer”
- Filming/Figuring Memory
- Walden
- Reminiscences of A Journey to Lithuania
- Lost Lost Lost
- Paradise Not Yet Lost
- Elegies
- As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
In the late 1940s, Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas were living in a displaced persons camp in Wisenbaden, Germany, following the end of the Second World War. There, for the first time in their lives, they had seen some films that stirred in them an interest in the medium, like John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). They had also...
When the Mekas brothers arrived in America, they immediately purchased their first camera, a Bolex. Mekas shot short bits of footage whenever he could, ostensibly as practice for future film projects, while aspiring to make feature length and documentary films. Deeply impressed by John Cassavetes’ Shadows (the first version) and Robert Frank and Al...
In 1971 Mekas admitted, “There is practically no snow in New York; all my New York notebooks are filled with snow.” (8) The world that Mekas sees through his lens might not be exactly as it is, but he is looking somewhere else, towards Paradise: a snowy street in New York, children sledding, a woman twisting a blade of grass in Central Park. Mekas ...
Walden was Mekas’ first diary film, and it was edited as a collection of images gathered between the years 1964 and 1969. Its original title was Diaries, Notes, Sketches, which was the intended name for all of his films (they would each have different subtitles), though when it became too confusing for film laboratories to distinguish between films...
After Walden, the next film Mekas completed was Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. By 1971, after twenty years of exile, the Lithuanian émigrés were finally allowed to return to their home country. The film consists of three parts. The first contains some of Mekas’ first footage shot in New York in the years 1950–53, scenes of immigrant life ...
Walden may have been Mekas’ first diary film, but the film that incorporated Mekas’ earliest footage was the one that told the story of his postwar arrival in America, Lost Lost Lost. The film is divided into two parts: the first concerns life in the Lithuanian community of Williamsburg, and the second chronicles Mekas’ move to Manhattan and his in...
In 1974, Mekas married Hollis Melton. Their daughter, Oona, was born the same year. Where Mekas had found a home in the independent film community during the 1950s and ’60s, by the mid-’70s he had his own family to care for. He made Paradise Not Yet Lost (aka Oona’s Third Year)in 1979 with footage shot in 1977. The film is arranged in six chronolog...
In the 1990s, Mekas began collecting footage from previous films to create several film portraits. Because his subjects had all passed away by the time of editing, however, these portraits function more as elegies. The first such elegy was made in 1978, when Mekas put together a sensitive portrait of close friend, filmmaker, artist, and Anthology b...
In 1991, Mekas released Quartet Number One, not knowing how long the long film project he was working on would be, or when it would be released. By 2000, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty was completed, and the footage from Quartet Number One was included in the film. The film is indeed long, the longest of Mekas’ fi...
The revelation of Jonas Mekas’s Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania in 1972 – particularly in contrast to his Guns of the Trees, which was made a dozen years earlier – was the unexpected seriousness, candour, precision and even reticence of a voice that had previously been identified largely by its shrillness and stridency, in cinema as well as in the pages of Film Culture and the ...
Aug 17, 2015 · We had the unique pleasure of meeting the great avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas (b.1922 - d.2019), who never went anywhere without his camera. ... We had the unique pleasure of meeting the great ...
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Jun 26, 2024 · Jonas Mekas & the New York Underground (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 149. See also Jonas Mekas, “Presentation of Diaries, Notes and Sketches (reels 1 and 2) at Millenium, New York, December 14, 1969,” in Pip Chodorov & Christian Lebrat, The Walden Book (Paris: Re:Voir Vidéo, 2009), 13.
