Retrospective: Jonas Mekas
The Jonas Mekas retrospective we have curated focuses on the autobiographical aspects of the artist’s work. Organized on the 100th anniversary of his birth, it underlines the artist’s life seen as material for his films.
The program focuses on the diaristic film form Mekas pioneered, practised and perfected. The program also highlights Mekas's immigrant status as a Lithuanian exile in America as a major factor in the process of forming the underground film and art community in New York, seen by Mekas as a “new nation”.
The program includes major works documenting first moments shot on 16mm film by the Mekas brothers in America (Lost Lost Lost, shot as early as 1949, edited in 1976), director's visits to Lithuania, the monumental reflection on his life As I Was Moving Ahead I Occasionally Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), up to the more recent video work Out-takes from the Life of a Happy Man (2012).
Mekas would be 100 years old today, but he makes us believe that cinema is only 100 years young. The film works selected for the program show the process of creation and rise, of both the individual artist and the avant-garde approach to filmmaking – fresh, young and free. Free from market demands and popular entertainment conventions but opening new perspectives for the poetic expression of the self.
Roman Gutek, Urszula Śniegowska, curators of Jonas Mekas retrospective