Jonas Mekas has always been known as a filmmaker making sketches, notes and portraits. In the 2000s, he started to exhibit photographic blowups of frames from his 16mm films presenting portraits of his friends cinematically imprinted in his life. Pretty rarely, however, one can see narrative and non-narrative film portraits of Jonas Mekas made by other filmmakers throughout the 20th century. In this first screening a few famous portraits of Mekas done by his friends will be presented.
After the first screening, the discussion on the films and the importance of portrait for the American Avant-Garde cinema will follow. Some portraits Mekas made of his friends will be exhibited at the Mekas’ Studio and presented by Sebastian Mekas.
“Twenty-Four Notes per Second: Jonas Mekas and his Environment” is a film program, curated by film critic Lukas Brašiškis and art historian Inesa Brašiškė, presenting already well-known and slightly lesser-known works of avant-garde film classics by Jonas Mekas. The program also includes works by other filmmakers documenting the New York avant-garde scene and Mekas’ role in it.
Film program at Skalvija Film Centre complements an exhibition “Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde” at the National Art Gallery, Vilnius.
As a part of the Maudit Festival, the Cinematheque de Grenoble will be screening “The Brig” (1964) by Jonas Mekas. The introduction of the film will be presented by Maxime Lachaud.
Noting the centennial of Lithuanian poet and filmmaker Jonas Mekas, Index will be hosting a three part screening series showing Mekas’ experimental diary film Walden from 1968. Using Walden as a point of departure, the series will feature panel discussions with guests whose practices reflect Mekas’ important role as enabler, organizer, connector of people, and devout advocate for art.
This first session is inspired by Mekas’ role in creating Anthology Film Archive and his legacy of fighting censorship and championing the work of queer filmmakers. It will focus on building archives for material which has been misrepresented or excluded in traditional writings of history, and methods for promoting and disseminating queer art.
Isabella Tjäder, Curator of Learning at Index, will moderate a discussion between Anna Linder, SAQMI – The Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images; Augustas Čičelis, išgirsti, Lithuanian Queer Archive, Vilnius Queer Festival Kreivės; Johan Sundell, Arkivet för Rosa Brus; and Laima Kreivytė, curator, writer and founding member of the queer feminist artists’ collective Cooltūristės.
Diaries, Notes and Sketches pt 2: Critique, contemplation and editorial outlooks is scheduled for 20 January 2023.
Diaries, Notes and Sketches pt 3: Poetic cinema and polyphonic practices is scheduled for 28 January 2023.
For more information on the sessions please visit link here.
Jonas Mekas 100! – the international programme of events celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Lithuanian-born filmmaker’s birth – comes to Italy with “Images Are Real”, an exhibition and series of events curated by the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, who have accompanied Mekas on a number art projects from Venice to New York, Seoul and Reykjavík.
The exhibition takes a retrospective look at the sixty-year career of Jonas Mekas (Biržai 1922 – New York 2019) within and beyond the history of avant-garde cinema. Presenting a broad selection of works ranging from the 1960s to the late 2010s, the project sets out to explore the Lithuanian filmmaker’s work as a form of resistance to human brutality, a quest for happiness through which to cope with the uncertainty of the present.
The title of the exhibition is a quote from the film “Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man”, in which the artist’s off-screen voice reflects: “Memory is gone, but the images are here, and the images are real!”.
An afternoon of screenings, readings and discussion to mark the centenary of the hugely influential Lithuanian filmmaker, poet, curator, archivist, diarist and cross-cultural documentarian.
This afternoon will celebrate his friendly, creative and informal ways of being in art and the world, showing Mekas’ own short films and his 1997 documentary Letters from Nowhere alongside readings and reflection from Lithuanian poet Rimas Uzgiris and London’s own Stephen Watts.
Programme
2pm Short Films and Videos: 1966-2017 (curated by Herb Schellenberger)
Two simultaneous Jonas Mekas’ film programmes in two main cinematheques of Israel – Tel Aviv Cinemateque and Jerusalem Cinematheque – will be presented for the audience, followed by roundtables and discussions, including local and international interlocutors.
The programmes curated by film critic Dr. Ariel Schweitzer.
For more information on this tribute please visit link here.
Flagey will celebrate the rich Baltic heritage with a “Baltic Sea Festival” programme of concerts, films, talks, and workshops. In the “Cinéma Lituanien” film programme the classics of the three film directors – Jonas Mekas, Šarūnas Bartas and Arūnas Žebriūnas – are presented in collaboration with the CINEMATEK.
For more information on screenings of Jonas Mekas films please visit this link.
Lithuania has been chosen as guest country of the 39th Busan International Short Film Festival in South Korea’s largest port city of Busan. The 39th Busan International Short Film Festival announced that Lithuania was selected as the Guest Country, which celebrated its 11th anniversary this year.
The film festival aims to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of director Jonas Mekas, a master of experimental film from Lithuania, who left a big footprint in the experimental film industry as the reason for being selected as this year’s guest country, and to expand the film to areas that have not been easily accessed.
The 13th Kaunas Biennial titled “Once Upon Another Time… gyveno jie jau kitaip” takes place from 12 November 2021 to 20 February 2022. The exhibition offers reflections on the current global situations, including the pandemic, with a curatorial project that explores human resilience and adaptation. Curated by Josée Drouin-Brisebois, the biennial investigates different forms of storytelling and narrative in contemporary art.
Among other international artists and groups, the exhibtion of Kaunas Biennial is showcasing an installation by Jonas Mekas “In An Instant It All Came Back To Me” (2015) consisting of 768 images taken from his films realized between the 1960s and the 1990s, as well as Douglas Gordon’s work “I Had Nowhere To Go” (2016) – a 97-minute portrait, in which Jonas Mekas reads passages from his 1991 autobiography of the same title. The selected films by Jonas Mekas are presented in special film programme.
More information on Kaunas Biennial can be found here.
