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Jonas Mekas

Filmmaker

Semeniskiai (Lithuania), 1925 - New York (United States), 2019

In 1944, after being detained by the Nazis together with his brother Adolfas, he was imprisoned in a labour camp for eight months. After the war he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz until 1949, the year he and his brother emigrated to the United States. They settled in Brooklyn, and two weeks after their arrival Mekas borrowed some money so that he could buy his first camera, a 16mm Bolex, and begin to record moments of his life. Mekas is one of the leading figures of American avant-garde cinema or “New American Cinema,” as he himself named it in the late 1950s, playing a number of roles in the movement.

In 1954, he became editor of Film Culture and in 1962, he co-founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative (FMC) 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 films. Mekas’ own output ranges from narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1962) to documentaries (The Brig, 1964) and “diaries” such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1976); Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, (1971-1972); Zefiro Torna (1992); and As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001): the latter assembled from an archive of 50-years worth of recordings of his life.

In 2007, Mekas filmed 365 short videos, one for each day of the year, releasing one a day on his website. In 2011, his last film Sleepless Nights Stories is presented at the Berlinale. The scope of his influence is incalculable: there is probably no other director in the world to whom so much is owed by so many.

www.jonasmekas.com/diary

Update: 24 January 2019

Contents

Publications

Xcèntric Cinema

Conversations on the creative process and the filmic vision

Has participated in

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Tribute to Jonas Mekas at the centenary of his birth

Sometimes, there are things that can only be said in a letter

Tribute to Mekas to mark the centenary of his birth

Jonas Mekas. You keep a diary & the diary will keep you

The CCCB's cinema

Flashes of beauty

Xcèntric Archive

Journeys and Songs

The CCCB's cinema

Diaries, notes and sketches

Aula Xcèntric 2017

Kosmopolis

Xcèntric Archive

Memory of Berlin

Portraits of cinema directors

The Living Theatre

Invisible Cinema

James Benning: històries del paisatge

Rewritings

Teen

Xcèntric Archive

The Complete Letters

Filmed Correspondence

That's not entertainment!

Cinema begets Cinema