Jonas Mekas. Farmer of Cinema
“I don’t really make films: I only keep filming,” once said Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), otherwise known as the “godfather of American avant-garde cinema.” In this essay, Herb Shellenberger takes an intimate look at the practice of this extraordinary artist, who recently passed away at the age of 96. An incredibly prolific filmmaker and a very modest man, who thought of himself as a “farmer” and a “filmer.”
On January 23, 2019, came the news we never expected to hear, though it was also inevitable: Jonas Mekas – the artist, filmmaker, organizer, musician, poet, diarist and critic, lover of wine, cats and jokes, and friend to all – died at the age of 96. Anthology Film Archives, the museum of cinema that Mekas helped to found in 1970, stated: “He died peacefully at home, with family at his side.” This day that seemed remote – Jonas was notoriously spry, witty and tirelessly productive well into his 90s – had suddenly arrived, and he would be delivered to sit alongside the angels to which he continually gave thanks for his life and longevity.
It is impossible to give all but the most cursory summary of Mekas’s life and work in such a short space. Born in the small village of Semeniškiai on Christmas Eve 1922, he was displaced from Lithuania by the Soviet army during World War II. After surviving forced labor camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel, Germany during the war, he and his brother Adolfas eventually emigrated to New York, where they nurtured their love of cinema and began filming in the 1950s, as well as founding Film Culture magazine together. After finding a community of like-minded “underground” filmmakers (including Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Jack Smith and Andy Warhol), Jonas and the group started initiatives like the artist-run, non-profit distribution company known as The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Anthology Film Archives. He also documented the local, national and international cinema scene in his “Movie Journal” column which ran in The Village Voice from 1958 to 1975.
Any of these grand undertakings would have been enough on their own to exhaust any ordinary human, but Jonas’s own filmmaking, writing and visual art flourished alongside these initiatives for many decades. Year after year, day after day, moment among moments, he was living and documenting his experiences through writing, filming, shooting video, taking photographs and talking with others. A seemingly indefatigable human, he was remarkably prolific yet also somehow the promptest email responder, bar none. Dashing a query off to his quaintly-out-of-date AOL email address would often yield a reply within minutes.
Delving into Jonas’s vast filmography is like uncovering treasure upon treasure. It’s hard to relate just how many films and videos he’s made. A rough tally of his filmography (as yet no definitive list exists, though there are about one hundred films) totals around 60 hours of running time, not including his 30hour Internet series The 365 Day Project (2007) and the 30 hours of other video posted since 2010 in the blog section of his website. This is perhaps a fraction of the hundreds – or more likely thousands – of hours he has filmed throughout his life. As one logs more and more hours of viewing, he or she loses sight of any bigger picture and just sits back for the ride. There’s no deep analysis necessary, no film theory required to augment what one sees; we just travel alongside and experience Jonas’s world the way he has. It becomes engrossingly meditative and you want more and more and more.
“The Major Works” is the title of a six-disc boxed set collecting Jonas Mekas’s pivotally important feature-length films like Walden (Diaries, Notes and Sketches) (1969), Lost Lost Lost (1976) and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), as well as a selection of short-form works. Though these films are undeniably major, I find through subsequent viewing that there is only the smallest gulf between “major” and “minor” works in the Mekas filmography.
Take a work like Film Magazine of the Arts from 1963, Mekas’s second film. Ostensibly a commission from a popular culture magazine called Show, the film is a panorama of the new arts in New York. Joseph Papp, founder of Shakespeare in the Park, is shown in Central Park directing rehearsals of Antony and Cleopatra. The “Americans ‘63” exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art showcases the newest Pop masters like Warhol, Oldenburg and Marisol, each of whom glistens under Mekas’s lens. A Robert Whitman happening, dancer Erick Hawkins, composer Lucia Dlugoszewski and underground filmmaker Jerry Jofen are each given short but substantial treatment in the 16-minute work, which covers a lot of ground but does manage to impart the distinctiveness of each subject. But more than that, the film cements Mekas’s style: one gets a representative view of the entire landscape by focusing intensely on a number of individuals. Despite the film being dumped by its patrons – and only released later by Mekas himself – it established Mekas’s roving technique which would continue to develop through his subsequent diary films.
The 1960s films of Jonas Mekas show his development with the 16mm Bolex camera, the first of which Adolfas and Jonas managed to buy shortly after moving to New York at the end of 1949. It took some years for Jonas to master the camera, but he turned it into an expressive instrument, exploiting all its different settings to develop a technique which would produce kinetic, vibrant and poetic images. Decades later, he would buy his first Sony video camera in 1987 and spend an equal amount of years mastering this different medium, which allowed simultaneous sound recording (film did not), long takes (an un-motorized Bolex can only shoot about 28 seconds), immediate playback and, importantly, a much more inexpensive carrier than celluloid film.
Mekas was a relatively late adopter of video with respect to some of his contemporaries, and this has resulted in a really strange collision of images that I’ve been lucky enough to observe twice, which we might call the “Mekas mirror.” Since Jonas was for so long ubiquitous as a “filmer”, as he called himself, and documentarist of everyday scenes, we can occasionally observe him documenting through others’ footage, sort of a forensic investigation into alternate views of the same scenes from his films. Videos by both Shirley Clarke and Andy Warhol provide this view.
In Mekas’s tribute to his close friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono (Happy Birthday to John, 1997), a title card describes the following footage as “June 12, 1971, at Klein’s.” The afternoon party thrown by Ono and Lennon at the home of their manager Allen Klein featured guests like Warhol, Miles Davis, Jack Nicholson and Shirley Clarke. Jonas is filming around the party and captures some shots of Clarke with a video camera pointed back at his lens. In a video released under her Tee Pee Video
Space Troupe, the party is shown from Clarke’s perspective. While Mekas’s footage was captured silently – and overlaid with an exhilarating live performance of an early version of Ono and Lennon’s Attica State – Clarke’s has sync sound and gives us access to the voices and conversations, as well as images visually textured much differently than Mekas’s footage. We learn that Warhol’s audiotape recorder has gone missing and Clarke suggests throwing everyone in the pool to find out if anyone has it in their pockets.
Similarly, in Mekas’s Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (Friendships and Intersections) (1990), Warhol is shown on the beach in Montauk with members of Jacqueline Kennedy’s and sister Lee Radziwill’s families. Radziwill ends up renting one of Warhol’s houses as a summer cabin for the family, and Jonas is shooting the whole crew at various points during the summer. Footage capturing Warhol on the beach with a video camera is mirrored by Warhol’s video footage that I was fortunate to glimpse as part of an installation of dozens of videos being simultaneously projected in Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum. While not entirely unprecedented – there are several documentaries and newsreels which show Mekas in the act of filming – these mirror image scenes are beautiful ruptures, in the sense that we can see these specific moments from outside Jonas’s vision through a different visual medium and with a different sense of time, sound and visual texture.
Of course Mekas would then join the video revolution and seldom look backwards, embracing the aspects of this technology that were so different from 16mm while still focusing on the same subjects. His 2005 video A Letter from Greenpoint is a case in point, and what he has called his “first real video work” after spending the previous decade and a half mastering this new instrument. The video focuses on Mekas’s move from his home of three decades in SoHo to the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, and what it is like to uproot oneself after such a long time. While we see scenes of moving house, cleaning the loft and settling in, much of the larger point is only made implicitly. There is little in the way of pontificating, but instead scenes of hanging out with friends, going through boxes, listening to music, drinking wine and playing with his cats Mitzy and Maxi. Once again, the pleasure is that Jonas distills these moments into a beautiful tapestry, sequencing conversations, radio snippets and talking directly to the camera into a warm but distinctively expressive statement.
Those of us who have heard Jonas in discussion more than once might start to notice similar refrains in his responses to questions. When an audience member asks him about his role as a filmmaker, he interrupts and promptly corrects: “I don’t really make films: I only keep filming. I am a filmer, not a filmmaker.” Similarly, in a casual conversation with John Waters in 2014, he said of his work at Anthology Film Archives: “I’m not an archivist, I just don’t throw out anything!” When asked by an audience member about his longevity and energy, he replied “I consider that there is nothing special neither about my energy nor anything because I’m the normal case. It’s all the others I consider abnormal cases.”
It might be difficult to square these modest proclamations with a person who has been dubbed “the godfather of avant-garde film,” a loaded term that implies he is at the same time a saint and a Mafioso don. For certain, Jonas has wielded much power and influence over the years. He gave exposure to artists he thought were worth knowing about in the pages of The Village Voice or even through recommendations of grants from the Jerome Foundation. Other artists not among his favorites didn’t have this leg up.
But in another way, Mekas’s humility makes sense. Through a series of unpredictable events he found himself in a new place, amongst new people, ideas and stimulations, and luckily – for him and for us – he flourished. However, he could just as likely have remained on the farm in Semeniškiai for his whole life, reading and writing and blowing a horn, and none of us would ever have heard it. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. In the film Laboratorium Anthology (1999), he says “I’m not sure sometimes that we are really a laboratorium; we are more like a farm. We are farmers, we are growing so many different things here. I think I am a farmer and this is a big farm.”
But Farmer Jonas still applied his homespun, agricultural sensibility to all of his activities, which he did not undertake out of any big plan but from necessity. Everything he has done – including Film Culture, Anthology, his poetry and filming – was made out of necessity. That’s it. There was never any plan to become the biggest or best, there was just a need and so the work was done.
In that sense, Mekas’s final decade was filled with a need to create. Since 2008’s five-hour Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR, Jonas made at least fourteen more films. He published four new major volumes since 2015, with at least two more to be released in 2019, and his masterpieces Movie Journal and I Had Nowhere to Go were republished after decades out of print. Again, there were enough exhibitions, conversations, writings and videos to tire any of us out, let alone someone in their nineties, but Jonas continued with a smile and a laugh.
Nevertheless, his final mission is yet to be completed: the expansion of Anthology Film Archives has been Jonas’s number one priority in this final decade, and he has worked tirelessly to raise the millions required. The expansion plan calls for another floor to be added above Anthology’s existing building, originally built in the 1910s as a courthouse. The new level will expand the facilities, allowing Anthology’s significant archive of paper materials – books, periodicals, production notes and correspondence from independent filmmakers – to become truly available for the first time, giving access to researchers, artists and the general public to these rich materials and continuing the legacy of Mekas, his compatriots and all the branches of the tree of cinema. There would also be improvements to film vault storage, a new cafe and other facilities, guiding the institution well into the future. Leading up to the 50th anniversary of Anthology Film Archives in 2020, Jonas has raised funds and mobilized his friends and community to accomplish this feat. It is one of what I think will be many gifts we are still to receive from Jonas, whose legacy will continue to grow and affect the world for many years to come.
Herb Shellenberger is a London-based curator, writer and Associate Programmer and Publications Editor of the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival.