Jonas Mekas

Biography

Mekas bought his first film camera two weeks after he stepped onto American soil. He had no money, so he borrowed it and bought a 16mm Bolex. That was the beginning of a film he would go on shooting for seventy years.

He was born on 24 December 1922 in the village of Semeniškiai near Biržai, into a peasant family. His parents, Povilas and Elžbieta, ran a small farm, and his father did some carpentry on the side; there were six children, among them a younger brother, Adolfas, who also became a filmmaker. In 1943 Jonas finished the gymnasium in Biržai. From 1941 to 1944, under the German occupation, he edited the culture sections of two local newspapers, Naujosios Biržų žinios and Panevėžio apygardos balsas. Historians have since disputed this part of his biography: he said that at the same time he transcribed BBC broadcasts for the underground, while in 2018 the historian Michael Casper, writing in The New York Review of Books, called this into question and pointed out that the newspapers were linked to nationalists and to the propaganda of the occupiers. The dispute continues, and I would not try to settle it on the material available.

In 1944 the brothers tried to get west, by way of Vienna to the Swiss border. Their train was stopped in Germany, and both were arrested and held for about eight months in a labour camp at Elmshorn, near Hamburg. They then hid on a farm near the Danish border until the end of the war. Jonas spent several months in displaced persons’ camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel, studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946 to 1948 and edited the journal Žvilgsniai. At the end of 1949 the brothers moved to the United States and settled in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn. Mekas went to screenings of avant-garde film, among them Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, studied with Hans Richter, and organised screenings of his own at Gallery East and in the Film Forum series. In 1954, together with Adolfas, he founded the journal Film Culture. From 1958 he wrote the column “Movie Journal” for the weekly The Village Voice, becoming its first film critic.

In 1962 he was among the founders of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and in 1964 of the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque. That same year he was arrested on obscenity charges for publicly showing Jack Smith’s “Flaming Creatures” and Jean Genet’s “Un Chant d’Amour”; he launched a campaign against censorship and went on showing films. From 1964 to 1967 the New American Cinema Expositions he organised toured Europe and South America. He was a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí and the fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas; in 1966 he joined Maciunas’s Fluxhouse Cooperative.

In 1970 Anthology Film Archives opened at 425 Lafayette Street, with Mekas as its director: a film museum, screening room and library. Together with Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, Ken Kelman and the film scholar Paul Adams Sitney, he undertook the Essential Cinema project, a canon of important films. Around the same time he began teaching film at the New School for Social Research, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cooper Union and New York University.

Mekas’s own films run from the early narrative “Guns of the Trees” (1961) to the diaries: “Walden” (1969), “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” (1972), “Lost, Lost, Lost” (1975), “Zefiro Torna” (1992) and “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty” (2000). He wrote poetry and prose in Lithuanian, English, French and German; his book “Idylls of Semeniškiai” (1948) is regarded in Lithuania as a classic. His diaries of 1944–1954 were published as “I Had Nowhere to Go”. In 2007 he put one film a day on his website, the “365 Day Project”. In the same year the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center opened in Vilnius; in 2005 his work had represented Lithuania at the 51st Venice Biennale. He was shown at Documenta in Kassel (2002, 2017), at the Serpentine Gallery and at the Museum Ludwig. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977), the Lithuanian National Prize (1995), honorary doctorates from Vytautas Magnus University (1997) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2018), the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art (2008) and the rank of Commandeur of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2013). Since 2011 he has been an honorary citizen of the Biržai district.

Mekas died on 23 January 2019 at his home in Brooklyn. His ashes were buried in Semeniškiai in June. His last work, the video “Requiem”, had its first showing in New York on 1 November 2019, alongside a performance of Verdi’s Requiem.