Jonas Mekas

Biography

In 1944, Mekas left Lithuania because of war. En route, his train was stopped in Germany and he and his brother, Adolfas Mekas (1925–2011), were imprisoned in a labor camp in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, for eight months. The brothers escaped and were detained near the Danish border where they hid on a farm for two months until the end of the war. After the war, Mekas lived in displaced person camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. From 1946 to 1948, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S., settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16mm camera and began to record moments of his life. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s pioneering Cinema 16, and he began curating avant-garde film screenings at Gallery East on Avenue A and Houston Street, and a Film Forum series at Carl Fisher Auditorium on 57th Street.

In 1954, together with his brother Adolfas Mekas, he founded Film Culture, and in 1958, began writing his “Movie Journal” column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers' Cooperative and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. He was part of the New American Cinema, with, in particular, fellow film-maker Lionel Rogosin. He was a close collaborator with artists such as Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas.

In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for showing Flaming Creatures (1963) and Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). He launched a campaign against the censorship board, and for the next few years continued to exhibit films at the Film-makers’ Cinemathèque, the Jewish Museum, and the Gallery of Modern Art. From 1964 to 1967, he organized the New American Cinema Expositions, which toured Europe and South America and in 1966 joined 80 Wooster Fluxhouse Coop.

In 1970, Anthology Film Archives opened on 425 Lafayette Street as a film museum, screening space, and a library, with Mekas as its director. Mekas, along with Stan Brakhage, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, and P. Adams Sitney, began the ambitious Essential Cinema project at Anthology Film Archives to establish a canon of important cinematic works.

As a film-maker, Mekas' own output ranges from his early narrative film (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to “diary films” such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1975); Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Zefiro Torna (1992), and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, which have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world.

Mekas expanded the scope of his practice with his later works of multi-monitor installations, sound immersion pieces and "frozen-film" prints. Together they offer a new experience of his classic films and a novel presentation of his more recent video work. His work has been exhibited at the 51st Venice Biennial, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Ludwig Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, and the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center.

In the year 2007, Mekas released one film every day on his website, a project he entitled "The 365 Day Project." The online diary is still ongoing on Jonas Mekas' official website. It was celebrated in 2015 with a show titled "The Internet Saga" which was curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi at Palazzo Foscari Contarini on the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale of Visual Arts.

Since the 1970s, he has taught film courses at the New School for Social Research, MIT, Cooper Union, and New York University.

Mekas is also a well-known Lithuanian language poet and has published his poems and prose in Lithuanian, French, German, and English. He has published many of his journals and diaries including "I Had Nowhere to Go: Diaries, 1944–1954," and "Letters from Nowhere," as well as articles on film criticism, theory, and technique. On November 10, 2007, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was opened in Vilnius.

Jonas Mekas in culture

The German fillmmaker Peter Sempel has made three films about Mekas' works and life, Jonas in the Desert (1991), Jonas at the Ocean (2004), and Jonas in the Jungle (2013).

Awards and honors

Filmography

Personal life

He married Hollis Melton in 1974. They had two children, a daughter (Oona) and a son (Sebastian). His family is featured in Jonas' films such as Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man.