I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema, the lyrical forms, the poem, the watercolour, etude, sketch, postcard, arabesque, bagatelle and little 8mm songs. I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere just fluttered its wings, and I know that the whole course of history will drastically change because of that flutter. A super-8 camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere, on New York's Lower East Side, and the world will never be the same.

Jonas is a true hero of the underground and a radical of the first degree – a shape-shifter and time-fucker… he sees things that others can't… his cinema is a cinema of memory and soul and air and fire. There is no one else like him. His films will live forever.

Filmmaker, writer, poet, artist and "godfather” of American avant-garde cinema—or “New American Cinema” as he coined it in the late 1950s—Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) is an impressive force within film. After six decades of filmmaking and writing poetry, Mekas remains devoted to creating new moving-image work amid many current book publications. He is the living embodiment of self-determination, perseverance and dedication. While cofounding Film Culture magazine with his brother Adolfas in 1958, he also wrote the influential “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice (1958-77) and, with Shirley Clarke, started the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which he helped transform into Anthology Film Archives in the early 70s.

He was born on Christmas Eve in the small farming village of Semeniškiai, Lithuania, a place, Mekas says, "where nothing happened, then suddenly everything happened." Namely, the Soviet Army moved into Lithuania in 1941, and Mekas joined the resistance, later fleeing the country with his brother. Arrested en route, they were taken to a Nazi labor camp near Hamburg and then were transferred to various displaced persons' camps for another two years after the war ended. Mekas remained in Germany until 1948, studying philosophy and other subjects in Mainz before leaving for New York with Adolfas in 1949.

Two weeks after his arrival in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Mekas borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16mm camera and began to film moments of his life. Shortly after discovering avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, Mekas began curating his own screenings. At the epicenter of a cultural and artistic revolution at that time in New York, Mekas encountered a burgeoning bohemian underground culture of artists, writers, musicians, photographers and filmmakers, and regularly crossed paths with artists like Maya Deren, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Stan Brakhage and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas, many of whom came to his Manhattan loft for regular film evenings.

In 1958, Jonas introduced film criticism to The Village Voice. His “Movie Journal” column became the de facto place to find out about underground cinema and a space for Mekas to rail against the establishment, censorship and its enforcers. Nevertheless, he stated bluntly in 1968, “I am not a critic. I don’t criticize. I am a cold, objective, ‘piercing’ eye that watches things and sees where they are and where they are going and I’m bringing all these facts to your attention.”  

Mekas created the New American Cinema Group in 1959 as a new model of distribution and exhibition for avant-garde film. Inspired by, but completely different from, Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, Mekas championed the right for all films to be shown. The collective became the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1962, and soon after, similar groups came together in San Francisco (Canyon Cinema) and London (London Film-Makers’ Co-operative), based on the Coop model. Combining the Coop with the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, both ventures were the foundation for what would ultimately become the Anthology Film Archives in 1970, dedicated to preserving and screening avant-garde films. "Virtually everything I created or helped create was done out of necessity," says Mekas.

In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for showing Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour (1950). In his column “Movie Times” he battled against the draconian laws governing censorship and launched a campaign against the censorship board, eventually going to jail several times for screening “pornography.”

Mekas' own film output began with his early 16mm works on exile, military domination and poetic freedom, such as his landmark The Brig. In the mid to late 1960s, Mekas developed and pioneered the “film-diary” style for which he is now most well known. Recording his day-to-day activities as well as those of his artist and filmmaking friends and family, Mekas preferred to document what he calls "the small, intimate moments that describe daily reality without being poetic." In 1967 Mekas was encouraged by filmmaker and scholar Gerald O’Grady to exhibit at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, where Mekas edited his first diary film Diaries, Notes, Sketches, or Walden. His technique of single-frame shooting, a handheld camera and “amateur” style was far from amateur and has since been recognized for its revolutionary impact on filmmaking and cinema.

Throughout his life Mekas has downplayed notions of being labeled as an artist or filmmaker, instead calling himself a “filmer,” saying "It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work."

Jonas and Adolfas’ return home to Lithuania after twenty-seven years resulted in two tender films of family gatherings, Jonas’ Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania in 1971–1972 and Adolfas’ rarely screened yet equally powerful Going Home. Filmed before Walden, Lost Lost Lost was edited and released four years later, retracing his arrival in New York and his interactions with celebrated figures like the Velvet Underground, LeRoi Jones and singer Tiny Tim.

In the 1990s Mekas frequently returned to his past—remembering those friends who had passed on—with a number of tender film portraits, most notably what he refers to as his “1960’s Quartet,” which includes the films Zefiro Torna or Scenes From the Life of George Maciunas, Happy Birthday to John, Scenes From the Life of Andy Warhol,and This Side of Paradise (1999) about his long friendship with Jackie Onassis and the Kennedy family. Of particular note is Zefiro Torna, his heartfelt tribute to fellow Lithuanian, friend and Fluxus compatriot George Maciunas, lovingly depicted in full vigor at various events and happenings.

This century Mekas released what may be one of his most imaginative and structured diary films, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. A magnum opus in many ways, including its near five-hour length, the film is a loving portrait of Mekas’ early family life and a contemplative goodbye to the end of an era. Even more recently, Mekascompleted his revelatory reflection Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man, ultimately one of his strongest films, in which he digs through fragments and scraps from his many completed works while working late into the night.

Beyond filmmaking, the engaged, energetic Mekas has also published more than twenty books of poetry and prose that have been translated into over a dozen languages—his Lithuanian poetry entering the pantheon of that country’s classic literature. Since 2000, Mekas has also expanded into the area of film installations, exhibiting frozen film frames and stills from his films at art galleries and museums around the world. In 2007 he embarked on one of his most ambitious endeavors to date, the 365 Day Project, in which he makes a film every day of the year and posts it online. This project continues to this day, with Mekas adding videos and material almost daily.

As Mekas says, "It's the essence of those normal moments that I am exploring, the intensity of feeling in them. That is what I have been trying to do for all these years. Really, I am an anthropologist of the small meaningful moment."

Long live the cinema!
Long live Jonas Mekas!

The Harvard Film Archive is honored to present a selection of films by Jonas Mekas—including one work by his brother Adolfas Mekas (1925-2011). Mekas will be in person for two special evenings, returning to the Harvard Film Archive for the first time since 1974. – Jeremy Rossen