Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekasis a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet and artist who has often been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema." His work has been exhibited in museums and festivals worldwide...
NationalityLithuanian
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth24 December 1922
CountryLithuania
technology giving tree
Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.
expression splits towns
Suddenly the intermedia shows are all over town..Theirs remains the most dramatic expression of the contemporary generation. The place where its needs and desperations are most dramatically split open. At the Plastic Inevitable it is All Here and Now and the Future.
needs use may
Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don't want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like that.
home
I make home movies-therefore I live. I live-therefore I make home movies
brother new-york home
Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.
confused eye way
As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.
real film moments
I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some will never be famous. But they are all my friends.
two long video
Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.
frozen way break
There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.
internet film needed
In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.
home mean i-can
Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
writing writing-poetry
I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
teenage teenager years
I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.
quality essentials insignificant
Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life