There was a blunt observation from 1959 by Jonas Mekas: the only way to shatter the petrified film traditions was if the official film mechanisms finally collapsed. Mekas is remembered for being born on the 23rd anniversary of his own hundredth year, and for leading by example. He was a revolutionary critic, a poet, a daring supporter of new forms, a fearless exhibitor, and, in many ways, a precursor to modern vlogging before the term existed. He became the godfather of underground cinema, dedicating seven decades to nurturing, preserving, and expanding the expressive possibilities of moving images through sixty films and an audiovisual diary that challenged the falseness, insensitivity, and aesthetic stagnation of prevailing themes, which he described as morally corrupt, aesthetically outdated, and temperamentally dull.
From the mid-1960s, Mekas acted as a catalyst for artistic experimentation from his Manhattan apartment. The Velvet Underground rehearsed there; Mekas connected Lou Reed with Andy Warhol, who would go on to produce the band’s debut album. Salvador Dalí visited the venue shortly before appearing in Mekas’s film Salvador Dalí at Work, a moment in which the artist coated a model with shaving cream. The guest list ran deep indeed. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were friends and collaborators on occasion. John F. Kennedy’s era wasn’t shy of influence here, and Jackie Kennedy asked Mekas to help teach cinema lessons by imparting film knowledge to her children. And when John and Yoko Ono moved to New York in 1976, Mekas greeted them with the practical question that framed his character: where could they find a good espresso late at night? The answer, to his eye, was a testament to the city’s enduring energy.
Poet in his native Lithuania
Before his fame as a filmmaker, Mekas was already a well-known poet in his youth. A native of Lithuania, he authored around 20 published books. While fleeing the country in 1944, his train was halted by Nazis and he and his brother Adolphas were sent to a labor camp, from which they escaped after eight months to hide on a farm near the Danish border. After the war they spent years in refugee camps until 1949, when they were able to travel to New York under United Nations auspices. He later recalled being twenty-seven, determined to reclaim the years lost and hungry for culture and encouragement. With the funds he gathered to buy a bolex camera, he began documenting his new life.
In 1954 the brothers founded Film Culture magazine, a cornerstone for exchanging ideas about the emerging avant-garde cinema and a platform for sponsorship. Four years later he became the first film critic for The Village Voice. He believed it was essential to safeguard the vibrant works of cinema that other writers and the public neglected or silenced. His uncompromising stance sometimes caused trouble; in 1964 he faced multiple obscenity charges for screening Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) and Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour (1950).
“He stood at the forefront of many movements and stood out for his informative spirit and militant approach that fostered a sense of brotherhood among filmmakers,” says a longtime producer. The Anthology Film Archives, co-founded by Mekas in 1970, now houses the world’s largest collection of experimental film. “He was never dogmatic,” notes the director of Between Two Waters (2018) and One Year, One Night (2022). In underground cinema, as in mainstream, his work encouraged a broad diversity of forms and voices.
Capture moments, not narratives
Mekas did not seek the label of filmmaker for himself. He preferred using the camera to capture fleeting moments rather than to craft tidy narratives. He filmed relentlessly, chronicling the underground scene and his own life, a practice that helped ease his sense of exile. “There’s nothing artistic about what I’m doing, because it’s a necessity,” he explained. The film that brought him international recognition, Cell (1964), takes place in a military prison and won a Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, yet his creative peak arrived with Walden (1979), a rapid montage of people and places interwoven with music, sound, and screen-printed text, and above all Memories from Lithuania Trip (1972), a piercing journey back to the place of his birth and to a camp in Hamburg where he was imprisoned. He continued to create almost until his last days, with Venus, his final feature, released just months before his death in January 2019 at the age of 96.
Great influence
The impact Mekas had on later American cinema is hard to quantify, yet visible in the ways it shaped writers and filmmakers who became pioneers. Directors such as John Waters and Jim Jarmusch draw sustenance from his work, and even a blockbuster fantasy-terror film could not exist without the path he helped forge. Carlos Reviriego, programming director of the Spanish Film Library, regards Mekas as a forerunner to today’s selfie culture and the rise of digital storytelling through short, portable clips. Reviriego recalls a conversation with Pier Paolo Pasolini in the 1960s where Mekas warned that everyone would carry a camera and that almost anything could be filmed.
Gonzalo de Lucas, a teacher and programmer, notes that filmed diaries were once almost non-existent, yet now audiences connect with Mekas’s work in new, accessible ways. They grasp his creative gesture and the way he expresses his experience through cinema, which helps viewers understand his perspective more clearly and appreciate his enduring contribution to the art form.