A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Jonas Mekas has made substantial contributions to film history as an organizer, as an editor and writer, and as a filmmaker. The driving force behind the New American Cinema Group, Mekas sought to change the film society model of noncommercial exhibition and distribution epitomized (in the United States) by Amos Vogel's Cinema 16. In place of what he called the "potpourri" approach to programming standard at Cinema 16 (on any given program, Vogel might present an experimental animation, a scientific documentary, a cartoon, a psychodramaall by different filmmakers), Mekas established the single film-artist show, first at New American Cinema Group presentations, and later at the New York Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives, which under his leadership became and has remained a leading institution devoted to the maintenance of the heritage of independent cinema. In place of Cinema 16's selective distribution policy (Vogel decided which films by an independent filmmaker he would distribute), Mekas promoted the cooperative distribution system in which filmmakers decide which of their films to distribute and receive all rentals minus the basic expenses of keeping the cooperative afloat. The result was the New York Filmmakers' Cooperative.

Mekas's commitment to making a cultural space for avant-garde film also energized his editorship of

Film Culture,

which published several issues a year, beginning in 1955 and continuing into the seventies (in more recent years, the journal has appeared irregularly).

Film Culture

remains a remarkable compendium of information and commentary about many forms of cinema. Mekas may have had his broadest influ-

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ence as a polemicist for independent cinema in "Movie Journal," the weekly column he wrote for

The Village Voice

from 1959 to 1971 (selected columns are available in

Movie Journal

(New York: Collier, 1972) and subsequently for

The Soho Weekly News

. No writer has written with more passionate insight about avant-garde film.

Mekas's dogged labors on behalf of independent cinema would have assured him a place in film history, had he never made a film of his own, but in fact he has been a prolific and influential filmmaker. At first, filmmaking was Mekas's primary means of dealing with his status as a refugee in the United States. Mekas and his brother Adolfas had fled Lithuania in 1944, as the Nazis took over (their pro-Lithuanian newspaper had made them a potential danger to Nazi control). They spent eight months in a German forced labor camp; then, after the war, four years in displaced persons camp (the experiences of these years were chronicled in regular diary entries, available now in

I Had Nowhere to Go

(New York: Black Thistle Press, 1991).

In 1949, the Mekas brothers arrived in New York, found a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and bought a 16mm camera. During the fifties Jonas Mekas documented the Brooklyn community of displaced Lithuanians at their meetings and on their outings. Later, when he had broken away from that community and moved to Manhattan, he chronicled the film and art scene he discovered there. In 1960, he completed the angstridden experimental feature narrative,

Guns of the Trees

. In 1963, hoping it would be the first installment of an alternative film "periodical," he recorded aspects of the New York art scene for

Film Magazine of the Arts

. And in 1964, he critiqued cinéma-vérité style by documenting the Living Theater's off-off-Broadway production of

The Brig

as though it were a real event.

By the end of the sixties, Mekas had developed an erratic, hand-held filmmaking style and a sense of imagery roughly analogous to the poetry he had written in Lithuania (Mekas remains a well-known literary figure in his native land), and he had completed

Walden

(1968), the first of a series of films called, for a time,

Diaries, Notes & Sketches

.

Walden

is an epic chronicle of Mekas's personal experiences, of the daily life and seasonal cycle of New York City, and of the cultural scene as Mekas observed it from 1964 to 1968, including portraits and evocations of Tony Conrad, P. Adams Sitney, Stan Brakhage, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Timothy Leary, Marie Menken, Gregory Markopoulos, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Ken Jacobs, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and many others. And it announces what had become Mekas's credo: "I make home moviestherefore I live. I livetherefore I make home movies." For Mekas, "Walden" is a state of mind open to the inevitability of natural process, regardless of where or

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how one experiences it. The film is "dedicated to LUMIÈRE," dramatizing Mekas's rejection of conventional theatrical narrative and its highly determined rhetoric, in favor of what he perceived as a return to cinematic basics and origins.