Originally posted on Facebook on Jan 23, 2019, 6:03 PM.
Where would I be without Jonas Mekas? Jonas, who passed away today at age 96.
I first heard about him in Andy Warhol’s Popism: The Warhol 60s, which I read when I was 17. I read it because I loved the Velvet Underground, but took away from it this guy Mekas, who ran the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York in the 1960s and showed Andy Warhol films. He was such “an academic” as Warhol said, that he even showed films by Stan Brakhage. So thanks for the leads, Andy, even if you were unappreciative of Stan.
I knew reading those passages about the underground film scene that it was my scene, and that Jonas was at the centre of it. This was all without seeing his films. I wouldn’t, in fact, see any Mekas till I was in the CFMDC preview booth on Portland and Kate and I watched Report From Millbrook, Hare Krishna and The Brig. I understood the context for Millbrook (Timothy Leary freaking that town out), but not yet The Brig (The Living Theatre, avant-garde performance that overlapped with Mekas and the underground film world).
I made a pilgrimage to New York in the late 80s and finally met Mekas. I spent a day at Anthology Film Archives, one of the more venerable and influential avant-garde film institutions that Jonas founded. My friend Mike Zryd was working and researching there, and I became a regular whenever I was in town. I also met Robert Haller helped make it all possible (strange but true). I bought every issue of Film Culture magazine, Jonas’s journal - no film periodical ever mattered as much to me. Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision was a special issue, as was a great issue on Expanded Cinema designed by George Maciunas (that I show EVERYONE who comes to my office, because I still love it so much), and a Maciunas-designed Warhol issue.The Paul Sharits issue still confuses and excites me.
I also bought as many other books and periodicals as I could stuff in my luggage.
About six years after that I brought Jonas to Toronto for screenings organized by Innis (but at the AGO?), and to talk about Snow during the Michael Snow Project (and be interviewed for my Snow doc.). By then, as much as the Film-Makers’ Coop, Cinematheque, Anthology, Film Culture, Essential Cinema, etc. mattered and still matter deeply to me, Jonas’s films entered my psyche for good. There’s almost nothing that I like more than first-person, low-budget, poetic, diaristic, autobiographical films: Mekas is the ultimate. My favorites:
• Award Presentation to Andy Warhol (1964) • Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1969) - 3 hours
• Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971–72)
• Lost, Lost, Lost (1976)
• He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1969/1985)
• Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990)
But, there are dozens of others that I’d be happy to see right this second.