Jonas Mekas

Quote:
These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949-1963. They begin with my arrival in New York in November 1949. The first and second reels deal with my life as a Young Poet and a Displaced Person in Brooklyn. It shows the Lithuanian immigrant community, their attempts to adapt themselves to a new land and their tragic efforts to regain independance for their native country. It shows my own frustrations and anxieties and the decision to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan. Reel three and reel four deal with my life in Manhattan on Orchard Street and East 13th St. First contacts with New York poetry and filmmaking communities. Robert Frank shooting The Sin of Jesus. LeRoy Jones, Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara reading at The Living Theatre.Read More »

Song of Avignon captures the darkness of depression like few other films, translating the overwhelming paralysis to the visual medium. Featuring fleeting glimpses of people and places strung together with a poetic rhythm, the visions embedded within Song of Avignon are tinged with the melancholy that Mekas was struggling to process. It almost functions like a haunting death rattle, coming across as the confessional of a man on the precipice of suicide.Read More »

Walden, Jonas Mekas’ first completed diary film, is an epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s, and also stands as a groundbreaking work of personal cinema.Read More »

THIS IS A HOME MOVIE OF LOW QUALITY.

This is recomended for only the DIE HARD interested in taking a peak at the Factory scene and the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground and Nico are present in this film and their sound is distorted if it is there at all. The sound does not sync up with the film. Also in the crowd are Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Barbara Rubin, Tuli Kupferberg, Peter Orlovsky, Ed Sanders, Gererd Malanga and Storm De Hirsch.Read More »

Quote:
Four young people are trying to understand why their friend, a young woman, committed a suicide. A film made up of disconnected scenes weaving between past and present. The title of the film comes from a poem by Stuart Perkoff which tells that some young people felt (around 1960) that everything is against them, so much that even the trees in the parks and streets seemed to them like guns pointing at their very existence.
– Jonas MekasRead More »

Documenting Mekas’s return to the Lithuanian village of his birth, Semeniškiai, for the first time since he and his brother Adolfas escaped from German labor camps and emigrated to the United States in the late 1940s, Reminiscences is arguably the greatest achievement within Mekas’s exploration of the film-diary form. We begin in Williamsburg with footage shot by Mekas with his first Bolex of his and Adolfas’s first years in exile, before skipping ahead to the brothers’ return to Lithuania in 1971, their reunions with family members, their experience of their home country as displaced people, and finally, their visit to the labor camp near Hamburg where they were imprisoned during World War II.Read More »

Max Goldberg wrote:
Cassis collapses a full day on the Mediterranean into a dazzling five-minute sketch. Time-lapse photography revels in the endless variations of atmosphere and light, with motorboats and sailboats sweeping across the bay like wind-up toys. The sudden flare of a lighthouse marks the end of the day (and, with it, Jonas Mekas’s gorgeous film)Read More »

On October 9th, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono’s art, designed by the Master of the Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art, in New York. On the same day an unusual group of John’s and Yoko’s friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krasner, and many others, gathered to celebrate John’s birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event.Read More »

Jonas Mekas:
My film diaries 1970-1979: my marriage, children are born, you see them growing up. Footage of daily life, fragments of happiness and beauty, trips to France, Italy, Spain, Austria. Seasons of the year as they pass through New York. Friends, home life, nature, unending search for moments of beauty and celebration of life friendships, feelings, brief moments of happiness. The film is also my love poem to New York. It’s the ultimate Dogme movie, before the birth of Dogme.Read More »