“There is no other way of breaking the frozen cinematic ground than a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.” So wrote the film-maker, archivist, cine-activist, ceaseless proselytizer, art-world provocateur and avant garde impresario Jonas Mekas in 1959 (paraphrasing Rimbaud, as any good beatnik should). More than any other single figure – more than any other 10, really – Mekas, who has died aged 96, wielded the pickaxe, broke that ground and remade American cinema from the shattered clods and shards the process yielded.
Mekas and his brother Adolfas were Lithuanian refugees who spent two years in slave labor camps in Nazi Germany and five more in post-war displacement camps in West Germany, before emigrating to New York City in 1950 (a moment Jonas greeted, with his characteristic naif’s exuberance, as one of shimmering ecstasy). Back home, Jonas had been one of Lithuania’s most celebrated young poets; after some weeks in New York, he bought his first Bolex 16 mm camera and began work in an altogether different realm of poetic endeavor.
The brothers founded one of the great American movie journals, the quarterly Film Culture, in 1954 – at a time when mainstream culture did not think those two words belonged next to each other. The quarterly was a forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the emergent avant garde cinema that would convulse the art and movie worlds for three decades: the new American cinema, as Mekas dubbed it, or American underground film, as it is now more commonly known. In Film Culture and his weekly column in the Village Voice (1959-1981), Mekas for years banged the drum for other and minor, alternative and iconoclastic kinds of film-making: a cinema, as he called it, “less perfect and more free”. His ecumenical approach to film culture, by no means characteristic of the wider, often schismatic avant garde for which he was the foremost impresario, was part of his saintly appeal: if you were making film-art that was personal and sincerely conceived, Mekas was on your side, come what may.
He also was responsible for securing exhibition venues in the scuzzier precincts of the old East Village throughout the late 50s and 1960s. He established Anthology Film Archives in 1970 and made it into a repository for fresh, radical and dissenting forms of film-making. (These days, it’s a kind of establishment force of its own, now that official culture sponsors have largely withdrawn funding support from avant garde film-makers.) The radical new film-makers of the early 60s had been hassled from pillar to post by New York’s bluenose cops for serially frightening the horses. A screening of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet’s Un Chant D’Amour was busted under obscenity laws, one of several occasions when Mekas found himself proselytizing to a courtroom rather than his readership. Anthology was also a refuge from that kind of nonsense, a safe space to be weird in.
A poet, an exile subject to the universal variant of homesickness, truly a nowhere man, Mekas was nonetheless as ubiquitous as Zelig: Jackie Kennedy was a friend, as was John Lennon, via Yoko Ono’s filmic side projects, and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were friends and occasional collaborators. The film-makers he befriended and championed represent the full range of the American avant garde, from Jack Smith, Taylor Mead and Andy Warhol to Robert Frank, Barbara Rubin, James Broughton and Stan Brakhage.
Mekas’ film-making style, he once said, was a direct result of his herculean efforts and packed schedule as a radical-culture mafioso. He was so busy that he often shot in short fragments, in diary or sketchbook style. “I had only bits of time to shoot only bits of film. All of my personal work became like notes,” he said in a lecture at New York University in 1978. His earlier movies, Guns of the Trees, described by J Hoberman in Midnight Movies as “a militantly disjointed expression of beatnik discontent, complete with stridently poetic interludes by Allen Ginsberg”, and The Brig, a documentary filming of a performance of the Living Theater’s aggressive and harrowing crowd-play, gave way to the style Mekas perfected in his greatest masterpiece, 1971-2’s Memories of a Journey to Lithuania. It unfolds in simple, often intoxicatingly beautiful poetic moments: the grass blowing in the wind, a friend playing the banjo, children singing, the village Mekas is from, the camp where he was a slave in Hamburg, all interleaved with title cards conveying Mekas’ characteristic dazed-beatnik euphoria. Mekas reworked much of this footage (and that of his earlier diary piece, Walden) over and over again, into subsequent diary-movies including Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Moments of Great Beauty (2008), all of them gorgeous and indelible.
The American avant garde cinema of the 1960s has long since been engulfed – as silent cinema also was – by the forward march of film history. But in his now-submerged Atlantean realm, Mekas was truly Poseidon with a trident, an impish poet who seemed immortal. As more than one friend observed this morning: “I thought he’d never die.” And he never will.