Jonas Mekas

Quote:
“Filmed in 1964-1968. Edited in 1978. The material for this film is footage that didn’t find a place in the WALDEN reels. Some of it begins in between LOST, LOST, LOST and WALDEN. It’s mostly New York, and some travel footage. The City friends: Richard Foreman, Amy Taubin, Mel Lyman, Peter Beard, David Wise, Andrew Meyer, Salvador Dali, Jerome Hill, David Stone and Barbara Stone, my brother Adolfas filming DOUBLE BARRELLED DETECTIVE STORY, Diane di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Ed Sanders, Gordon Ball, Henry Romney, Jack Smith, Shirley Clarke, Louis Brigante, Jane Holzer, etc. etc. It’s a period piece. The sounds were recorded about the same time. Bits of radio music, bits of records, my own voice, and voices of my friends. Mel Lyman playing playing banjo on the roof on 23rd Street was actually recorded on the roof, with the wind blowing into the mike.” -Jonas MekasRead More »

IMDb User wrote:
This correspondence, or exchange of letters and video diaries between acclaimed filmmakers Jonas Mekas and José Luis Guerin is extremely potent, there’s sorcery at play in the mixture of the two. Together they’re light and dark. Mekas knows life’s joys, and is always a participant in what he films, Guerín is a detached observer, cold, present only as a black mote, reflected in the eye of one of his subjects. Guerín shoots in black and white and strives for formalism, Mekas loves hazard, loves his chaotic hand-held colour camera. Jonas Mekas felt that his images were inferior to those of Guerín, but a picture of his son Sebastian devouring a pickle, followed by Jonas on the deli sausage and wine, and then a cheeky close up of Goethe’s Faust; which of them Faust and which Mephistopheles? That one shot set me thinking about the nature of art and the privilege of artists, and could be interpreted in any one of several fruitful ways.Read More »

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex, during my first years in America, mostly from 1950-1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Williamsburg.

— Jonas Mekas wrote:
“The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semeniškiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming. You don’t really see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in twenty-five years.Read More »

Quote:
Jonas Mekas’ The Brig is a fake documentary about ten confined soldiers in a U.S. Navy ship and the three guards who beat and humiliate them. After the title of the film, “The Brig”, the next title is “March 7, 1957 – U.S. Marine Corps – Camp Fuji, Japan – 4:30” Then Mekas goes on showing the daily lives of the soldiers, which consists of beatings, degradations, unnecessary cleanings and senseless rituals. The audience is expected to constantly question the reality of what is on the screen while being moved by the illusion.Read More »

Jonas Mekas spend his summer holiday with Jackie Kennedy, her sister’s families and children.Read More »

Quote:
This film originated from my readings of the One Thousand And One Nights. But unlike the Arabian tales, my stories are all from real life, though at times they too wander into somewhere else, beyond the everyday routine reality.

There are some twenty-five different stories in my movie. Their protagonists are all my good friends and I myself am an inseparable part of the stories. The storyteller of the Arabian Nights was also part of his or her tales.

Some of the people in the movie you’ll recognize, some not. The fact that some of them you’ll recognize has no bearing on the stories: after all, we all recognize John Wayne or Annette Bening, but in their stories they are no longer the people we know.Read More »

Jonas Mekas’ BIRTH OF A NATION (1997) continues the filmmaker’s investigation into the possibilities of film-as-diary to offer glimpses of key figures of experimental cinema, including Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, and Michael Snow, compiled from footage shot over four decades. As far back as the masterpieces WALDEN (1969) and LOST, LOST, LOST (1976), Mekas has been turning his roaming camera on those around him, eschewing conventional documentary in favour of a more impressionistic, subjective engagement with his friends and surroundings.Read More »