“Since 1950, I have never stopped keeping my filmed diary. I walked around with my Bolex reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, and seasons. Some days I would shoot 10 shots, some days 10 seconds, some days 10 minutes, or I would shoot nothing… “Walden” contains the film material from 1964 to 1968 edited in chronological order. The soundtrack uses sounds recorded at the same time: voices, subway, street noises, a little Chopin or accordion… “. — Jonas Mekas. The film is shown on 16 mm.
This year EX!T 12 presents “My Own Private Mekas” – a retrospective program of the centennial celebration of Jonas Mekas’s life long work. In EX!T 12 we focus on the films of Jonas Mekas that have rarely been known or screened for general audience. Besides the importance of Jonas Mekas as a diary filmmaker and the godfather of avant-garde cinema, our 9 selected films represent and highlight a different part of Meka’s filmmaking career and his overall oeuvre, which connect and emphasize his relationships with experimental film, contemporary art, home movie, and Hollywood. The program we present this year is a private landscape of Jonas Mekas and his own private Lithuania, or his own private Ithaca.
Films to be screened: “Reminiscences from Germany” (2012); “Notes on an American Film Director at Work” (2005); “Notes on an American Film Director at Work: Martin Scorsese” (2005); “Letters to Friends…From Nowhere #1”; “A Walk” (1990); “Quartet number one” (1991); “Reminiszenzen Aus Deutschland” (2013); “Autobiography of a Man” (2000); A Few Notes on the Factory (1999); In Between (1978); “The Education of Sebastian or Egypt Regained” (1992).
Film program is curated by Pip Chodorov, a dear friend of Jonas and devoted member of “the Gang.” He is founder and director of Re:Voir, a Paris-based company that publishes and distributes DVDs of classic and contemporary experimental cinema.
“The three 16mm films that make up this program are themselves composed of episodes. Peter Rose’s “The man who could not see far enough” (1981, 33 min) is in five parts, a series of tableaux that evoke the act of vision, the limits of perception and the rapture of space. Ken Kobland’s “Vestibule” (1978, 22 min) is in three parts, exploring an urban space and a meditation on time, an intersection of memories and fantasies. Both films are also virtuoso experiments in optical printing, Rose using frames in the frame to describe a multiplicity in space, Kobland slowing and superimposing gestures to describe a palimpsest in time. The third film “New York Scene” (1967, 35 min) is a series of experiments by Takahiko Iimura, who also approached the act of filmmaking in the late 1960s as a self-referential meditation on the camera’s ability to see, and on the space and time of the film image. I am excited to see these three films projected together and complementing each other.” — Pip Chodorov
For over 70 years, Lithuanian filmmaker, Jonas Mekas, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Internationally known as the “godfather” of avant-garde cinema, he inspired countless independent artists, from Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, John Lennon to John Waters and Jim Jarmusch; all drawn to his indefatigable spirit and belief in the transformative power of cinema. But internally, he struggled. The traumas of his early life and exile stayed with him.
Directed by K.D. Davison “Fragments of Paradise” is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries—including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all… with a camera.
“Fragments of Paradise” will be premiered on September 2, 2022, 17:00h at the The 79th Venice International Film Festival, Sala Casino,
and screened on September 3, 2022, 17:00h in Sala Volpi.
Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) – filmmaker, author, and curator – always said that his works were not political. However, often, the exact opposite was the case. His response to the horrors of the 20th century was to turn to the everyday in an artistic way. He sought an aesthetic form for it in his films, diaries and poems and ascribed it with a force of humanization. The eventful history of the past 100 years is reflected in his work.
On the 100th anniversary of Jonas Mekas’ birth, the program curated by Christoph Gnädig, Christian Hiller and Anne König addresses the political dimensions of his oeuvre. Panels with filmmakers, artists and like-minded peers explore Memories, Displacement, Counter-Culture, Cold and New Wars and the Politics of Everyday. In addition to the program in Cinema 1, political video works by Mekas will be installed in Cinema 2. The program will be expanded on the digital platform arsenal 3 with films by Chantal Akerman, Sergei Loznitsa, and Jonas Mekas. There will also be performative readings by Heike Geißler, Eglė Lukšaitė and Goda Palekaitė. Asia Bazdyrieva will from her Ukrainian war diary.
“After Abbas Kiarostami and Victor Erice, the CCCB in Barcelona has repeated the experience with this video correspondence between Jonas Mekas and José-Luis Guerín. Both travel, both work at home, both reflect on their practice and the world around them in relation to their common obsession with filming. Admiration and respect, Europe and the United States, springtime here and springtime there, seriousness and joy of life. Crossed self-portraits that are addressed in images and sounds, and resolutely intended for everyone.” – Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID Marseille 2011
The Danish Film Institute will join the celebration of Jonas Mekas’ centennial year with a film retrospective. Certain films will be presented by experts who are well acquainted with Mekas’ films. Introduction by Arūnas Kulikauskas, Sebastian Mekas, and Lars Movin is foreseen before the screenings:
“Jonas Meka’s Anthology” by Arunas Kulikauskas, Eimantas Belickas, Vytautas Landsbergis / 2022 / 75 min
“Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” by Jonas Mekas / 1972 / 82 min
“Walden” by Jonas Mekas / 1969 / 180 min
“The Brig” by Jonas Mekas / 1964 / 68 min
“The Sixties Quartet” by Jonas Mekas / 1990 / 129 min
“Lost, Lost, Lost” by Jonas Mekas / 1976 / 180 min
“The Misfits” by Lars Movin / 1993 / 79 min
More information about the program and the list of Jonas Mekas’ screenings here.
Time-Line7# film festival in Brazil will join the celebration of Jonas Mekas’ centennial year with the “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty” film.
Programmed by The Film Gallery on the occasion of the celebration of its centenary, the exhibition “To New York With Love” presents 21 offset lithographs and the screening of the film “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses Of Beauty” (2000) by Jonas Mekas.
The 21 offset lithographs, “To New York With Love”, is a sensitive tribute to the city, a gift of poetic reminiscences to its viewers. Mekas’s images – which range from seemingly banal pictures of teens playing in Central Park to Rockefeller Center’s bedazzled Christmas tree – retain the compositional form of the film strip.
