Jonas Mekas, the filmmaker often referred to as the ‘godfather of the avant-garde’, who pioneered the diary-film through his intensely personal works such as Walden (1969) and Lost Lost Lost (1976) and a new generation of young, eager artists came along for the ride.
His focus was on diary filmmaking, a style of personalised cinema in which actual events in the life of the filmmaker are documented in a quasi-documentary mode, but are more openly subjective and impressionistic, more poetic.
New York-based Lithuanian Jonas Mekas is the leading exponent of this cinematic form
to create a poetic record of moments in people's own lives, and of their families, while learning how to shoot on 16mm film using a Bolex H16, the camera used by Jonas for nearly 40 years. The Bolex is a camera renowned for its myriad functions, enabling multiple creative possibilities for shooting spontaneous effects in-camera.
Mekas is an integral figure in the history of what used to be called underground cinema, not just as a film-maker, but as a writer, a curator and a catalyst.
His career is peppered with the names of the more famous people he worked with in the golden age of avant-garde film-making in the 1960s, from Yoko Ono to Jackie Kennedy, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats to the Warhol set. Many of these figures ended up in his films, which have in turn influenced the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, John Waters and Mike Figgis, along with influencing new filmmakers such as l'enfant terrible Fabrizio Federico, ''His films are like a breath of fresh air, he just goes along with the flow, records life as it is and isnt interested in being stressed out by commercial success, he's his own cinema planet, I identify completely with his relaxed poetic attitude to cinema.''
Mekas also befriended the Velvet Underground, allowing them to rehearse in his loft and filming their famous gig at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Legend has it that it was Mekas and his friend, experimental film-maker Barbara Rubin, who introduced Warhol to Lou Reed.
His films are all, to one degree or another, impressionistic biographical diaries. Rejecting drama, suspense, storytelling and linear narrative of any kind. Mekas prefers to document what he calls "the small, intimate moments that describe daily reality without being poetic". His art is one of the jump cut and the fleeting, flickering image, which is often caught on faded colour on a Bolex 16mm camera, then woven into a bigger fabric of moments and memories.
In New York, Mekas encountered a burgeoning underground culture of artists, writers, musicians, photographers and film-makers, regularly crossing paths with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, film-maker Maya Deren, Robert Frank, John Cage and musician La Monte Young, many of whom came to his Manhattan loft for his regular film evenings.
"Virtually everything I created or helped create was done out of necessity," says Mekas. "Film Culture magazine, for instance, was born because we met and discussed films regularly, but there was no voice for us like there was in Britain, which had Sight & Sound magazine, or France, which had Cahiers du cinéma. It was the same with the screenings, which I organised simply because there were so many films that needed to be shown. And, when we started showing them, I then had to put the information out in my column in Village Voice. All of it was driven by necessity."
