Filmmaker and Poet Jonas Mekas Dies at 96

Anthology Film Archives announced on its Instagram today that beloved filmmaker Jonas Mekas passed away this morning at the age of 96. He was at home in Brooklyn with his family. Alex Greenberger writes more at ArtNews: 

...Mekas has often been cited as one of the most well-connected artistic figures in New York during the postwar era. (And without his friendships, some of the era’s most important films—including Andy Warhol’s Empire, which Mekas helped shoot—might not have come to fruition.) His circle included artists, of course—among them Warhol and Salvador Dalí—but it also extended to other luminaries of the New York scene. Jackie Kennedy, the First Lady during the early 1960s, was among those who counted Mekas among her friends, as did the members of the band the Velvet Underground.

At the same time, Mekas was working on his own films. In 1964, Mekas produced his most known work, The Brig, a film version of an Off-Broadway play of the same name by Kenneth H. Brown. Over the course of an hour, the film tells the story of U.S. Marines brutalizing a group of detainees in a Japanese prison in 1957. Though the film’s set is spare, with just a squarish cage structure and some uncomfortable-looking beds, Mekas makes it feel like a documentary—the camera shakes when it circles around the prisoners as their beds are ransacked and they are rounded up like cattle. The footage comes to seem less like art than like life itself.

The Brig was regarded as something new and bold. In its review, Cahiers du Cinéma noted, “When leaving this film, one promises never to see it again. For it seems impossible to watch such a spectacle twice.” When it screened at the 1964 Venice Film Festival, it was awarded the Grand Prix for documentary filmmaking.

Much of Mekas’s photography and filmmaking in the intervening decades blurred this boundary between art and life. He often described his work as “personal” (as opposed to “public” Hollywood filmmaking) for the way it dealt often with people and places that he knew well. His 1969 film WALDEN comprises a three-hour montage of home movies, the subjects of which include wind blowing through leafless branches, the film historian P. Adams Sitney holding up his hand for the camera, and a woman playing with a daisy. The film’s form is something to behold, with a jagged soundtrack and equally jagged editing that jumps between color and black-and-white and back again.

In 1970, working with Jerome Hill, Sitney, Peter Kubelka, and Stan Brakhage, Mekas opened the Anthology Film Archives... 

Mekas was also a diarist, archivist, artist, and poet, prolific to his last days. His memoir, I Had Nowhere to Go, was republished by Spector Books in 2017. Video diaries, interviews, writings, and more can be found at his website. He was known to appear at the Poetry Project's New Year's Day Marathon readings, and he read beautifully at the Segue Reading Series in New York in 2015. Here is a short video that encapsulates both. Mekas's influence on avant-garde film and art is incalculable. He will be greatly missed.