Remembering Jonas Mekas in New BOMB

Writer and filmmaker Marianne Shaneen remembers Jonas Mekas for the summer issue of BOMB: "When I arrived in New York City as a twenty-year-old, hungry for culture, the first film I saw was at Anthology Film Archives—and when Mekas introduced the afternoon screening by uncorking a bottle of wine and toasting, 'TO CINEMA!' I knew I was home." More:

Hailed as “the patron saint of the avant-garde” (and Mekas believed in saints and angels), he produced volumes of writing and hundreds of films that comprise just a fraction of his extraordinary contribution: If you love something, you want to share it… You want to preserve it… so it won’t disappear. It’s a responsibility to the community… If nobody is doing that, I have no choice. I have to do it! 

One of the founders of the Filmmakers’ Coop-erative (the world’s oldest, largest distributor of independent media), as well as the incomparable Anthology Film Archives (the “cathedral of the avant-garde” as he called it), Mekas was a tireless fundraiser and radical champion of noncommercial culture. He cofounded (with Adolfas) Film Culturemagazine and was the Village Voice “Movie Journal” column’s self-proclaimed “raving maniac of the cinema.”

Shaneen also collects thoughts from a range of other friends of Jonas. Read on at BOMB.