Jonas Mekas (1922, Semeniškiai, Lithuania – 2019, Brooklyn, US) lived and worked in New York as an artist, poet and filmmaker whose movies are a cornerstone of independent cinema worldwide. In 1944, Jonas and his brother Adolfas were deported by the Nazis to a forced labour camp in Elmshorn, Germany. At the end of 1949, the UN Refugee Organization brought both men to New York, where they settled down in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Thanks to his friendship with compatriot George Maciunas, Mekas immediately became active in the Fluxus group. It is well known, for instance, that he filmed Bed-In (1969) and Up Your Legs Forever (1970), two major performances by Yoko Ono, who, in February 2015, was awarded the Lennon Courage Awards for the Arts at the MoMA, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 1949, two months after he arrived in New York, the artist bought his first Bolex camera. He soon got deeply involved in the American Avant-Garde film movement, at first curating screenings for the non-profit organisation Film Forum and the Carl Fischer Auditorium. In 1954, he founded Film Culture magazine, which soon became the most important film publication in the US. In 1958, he began his legendary Movie Journal Column in The Village Voice. At the end of 1960, he signed the New American Cinema Manifesto, which is representative of an entire generation of independent filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger, among others. Developing the ideas expressed in the manifesto, in 1962, Mekas founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and, in 1964, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, which eventually grew into the Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde cinema.
It is difficult to find an avant-garde filmmaker who has not been influenced by Jonas Mekas: from Andy Warhol’s feature films to Michael Snow’s structural cinema, to Stan Brakhage’s expressionist cinema, to Stan VanDerBeek’s expanded cinema. Many Confirmed artists of the late twentieth century recognised his fundamental role, almost preparatory, for their career: Joan Jonas, Carolee Schneemann, Chantal Akerman, Douglas Gordon, and Harmony Korine, to name a few.
