CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESSLITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNALE
ROOM 1
Home Videos
1987–1995, video installation
I got my first video camera in 1987. By that time I had used up four Bolex cameras. I felt I had reached the end of what I wanted to do with a Bolex camera. I even began noticing that I was beginning to imitate myself. I had gone full circle. The time had come to go into something else. That something else was video. It took me some ten years to master my Bolex camera. I thought video would be much easier. It proved to be as difficult as film. Only now, after a good fifteen years of working with a video camera, am I beginning to feel really free, as I was with my Bolex. These early video diaries reflect a lot of my struggle to master the video camera in such a way that it would really catch life around me as truthfully and as personally as I want. It is not always that I have succeeded. But I have tried. I am presenting these diaries in an installation format, so that you could make your own movie out of this material by moving from one monitor to another and still another. A diary form is a very personal and open form of art. Have a good time!
Jonas Mekas
JONAS MEKAS
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNALE
ROOM 2
PRESENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH MAYA STENDHAL GALLERY, NEW YORK
Cassis
1966, 16mm film, 4 min.
Filmed at a higher-than-normal speed (using a setting which recorded less than the normal 24 frames per second), which allowed Jonas Mekas to film a sunset at Cassis, France, which plays back in only three minutes.
Jonas Mekas made the “short” film Cassis in the ancient fishing port of the same name in the South of France, during a visit to a friend, the filmmaker and visionary philanthropist Jerome Hill. Mekas was moved by the history of the site, its landscape and the light. From his room he could see the high ridge of rock that juts upward out into the sea, and below in the middle distance, a quai that extends from the town to a lighthouse, marking the entrance to the harbor of Cassis. He was attracted to the progress of the light of day, the movement of the clouds and water, the fixed position of the lighthouse as a kind of marker, the many sailboats passing in and out of the harbor.
Improvising a support for his Bolex in lieu of a tripod, he shot from just before sunrise until just after sunset, a frame or two every second or every few minutes, with a soundtrack of the ocean’s roar. Viewed from on high, as the film time speeds by, the sailboats that go in and out of the harbor resemble seagulls, and strollers move out along the quai to the lighthouse, then return. The filmed light is opalescent much of the time, an effect of the clouds scudding by and the reflection of the light. The sea appears to breathe, swelling with the movement of the tide, and as the sun comes nearer to setting, the clouds alter in their composition, illuminated from below. Finally, night falls, and all that remains is the stronger incident of light that is the essence of the lighthouse, and the relatively smaller lamps that border the quai.
Edward Leffingwell
Notes on the Circus
1966, 16mm film, 12 min.
Jonas Mekas films a circus experience from the viewers’/audience perspective, edits fragments of the 16mm film to produce images which dance and uses colors that flash across the screen. With musical accompaniment.
That same year, Mekas filmed the colorful, light and action-oriented Notes on the Circus, a carnivalesque riot of plumed dancers, trapeze artists and acrobats, horses, big cats, jugglers, stilt-walkers, flying doves, a flaming hoop, sequined costumes sparkling in the chiaroscuro produced by the impact of available light. He chooses the jug-band music popular at the time as an oddly appropriate, buoyant soundtrack.
Edward Leffingwell
Travels
1970, 16mm film, 7 min.
A compilation of images from five short travelogues when Jonas Mekas visited Italy, Russia, and Sweden.
Happy Birthday to John
1996, 16mm film, 24 min.
Jonas Mekas filmed a birthday party for John Lennon.
Constructed in segments, the very human Happy Birthday to John (24 minutes, 1996) offers ample evidence of Mekas’s long and mutually supportive association with fellow filmmakers John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There are kaleidoscopic glimpses of the famous, and a soundtrack that knits together disparate elements of a film journal conceived as a birthday tribute to Lennon. The film casually documents Lennon’s birthday in 1972, and includes footage of a Lennon/Ono concert in Madison Square Garden filmed that same year. Throughout, Lennon and Ono cavort, perform and hang out with such celebrities de jour as Viva, Jane Forth, Holly Woodlawn, Andy Warhol, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsberg and others, doing what ordinary people do as the camera points their way.
Edward Leffingwell
Elvis and Wien & Mozart
2001, 16mm film, 2 min.
Elvis’s last concert in New York (as opposed to his last concert ever). Jonas juxtaposes the music of Mozart with images of an Elvis concert.
Closely related in its extreme play of light and darkness is the one-minute Elvis (2001), commissioned by the 2001 Viennale Film Festival and made from footage from the last of a series of four New York concerts given by Elvis Presley in 1972, five years before his death. Jonas Mekas’s oddly elegant, near-parodic soundtrack is Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube, a nod to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Electric in the lights of Madison Square Garden, Presley is ghostly, magnetic, at the top of his game, appearing before the adoring multitude to the tune of Richard Strauss’ anthemic Also Sprach Zarathustra, Kubrick’s introductory selection for 2001. When Mekas catches the white-suited Presley at a particular angle, as he turns, the singer’s head disappears in darkness.
Edward Leffingwell
Film for Maya: Father and Daughter
2005, video, 4,5 min.
Jonas Mekas filmed a four-and-a-half minute video of his two cats nurturing each other. Dedicated to Maya Stendhal.
JONAS MEKAS
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNIAL
Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant. Either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all. To go back and shoot it later, that would mean restaging, be it events or feelings. To get it now, as it happens, demands the total mastery of one’s tools (in this case, Bolex). It has to register the reality to which I react and also it has to register my state of feeling (and all the memories) as I react. Which also means that I had to do all the structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera. All footage that you’ll see in the Diaries is exactly as it came out from the camera: there was no way of achieving it in the editing room without destroying its form and content.
Walden contains materials from the years 1964–1968, strung together in chronological order. For the soundtrack I used some of the sounds I collected during the same period: voices, subways, much street noise, bits of Chopin (I am a romantic), and other significant and insignificant sounds.
They tell me I should be always searching; but I’m only celebrating what I see. (from the soundtrack)
I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make home movies. (from the soundtrack)
Jonas Mekas
EVERY WEDNESDAY
Lost, Lost, Lost
Filmed 1949–1963, edited 1976, 16mm film, 2 h 58 min
These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949–1963. They begin with my arrival in New York in October 1949. Reel One and Reel Two deal with my life as a Young Poet and Displaced Person in Brooklyn. It shows the Lithuanian immigrant community, their attempts to adapt themselves to a new land and their desperate efforts to regain independence for their native country. It shows my own frustrations and anxieties and the decision to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan. Reel Three and Reel Four deal with my life in Manhattan on Orchard Street and East 13th St. First contact with the New York poetry and filmmaking communities. Robert Frank shooting The Sign of Jesus, Leroy Jones, Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara reading the Living Theatre. Documentation of the political protests of the late 50s and early 60s. First World Strike for Peace. Vigil in Times Square. Women for Peace. Air Raid protests. Reel Five includes Rabbit Shit Haikus, a series of haikus filmed in Vermont; scenes at the Film-makers’ Cooperative, filming Hallelujah the Hills; scenes of New York city. Reel Six contains a trip to Flaherty Seminar; a visit to the seashore in Stony Brook; a portrait of Tiny Tim; opening of Twice a Man; excursions to the countryside seen from two different views, that of my own and that of Ken Jakobs whose footage is incorporates into this reel.
The period I’m dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. These reels carry the title Lost, Lost, Lost, the title of the film myself and my brother wanted to make in 1949, and it indicates the mood we were in, in those years. It describes the mood of a Displace Person who hasn’t yet forgotten the native county, but hasn’t gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel where we begin to see some relaxation, where I begin to find moments of happiness. A new life begins. What happens later you’ll have to see in the next installment of reels…
Jonas Mekas (March 31, 1976)
EVERY THURSDAY
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of his Life
1969/1985, 16 mm film, 150 min
A continuation of my film diaries. The footage covers the period from 1969 to 1984. During the same period I shot much more footage than what you see in He Stands… I am including in this film only the most impersonal footage. Originally, I was planning to call this film Anthropological Sketches. It consist of scenes, sketches of people, activities, happenings, events outside – or almost outside – of my life which I am observing from a slight distance. There are some sketches that are from personal life, I include them to balance, to warm up the impersonal material. There will be two more films from the same period: one will include all my “personal” material (home, friends), the other all my “abstract” material.
The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with, places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow, blizzards, etc.), many of my filmmaker friends such as Hans Richter, Rossellini, Marcel Hanoun, Adolfo Arrieta, Henri Langlois, Cavalcanti, Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, Kuchars, Breer, Willard Van Dyke, Frampton, etc., or just friends, such as John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, John Kennedy Jr., & Caroline, Tina and Anthony Radziwill, Peter Beard, Andy Warhol, Richard Foreman, P.Adams Sitney, Yoko Ono, Raimund Abraham, Hermann Nitch, Allen Ginsberg, George Maciunas, and countless others – streets and parks of New York – brief escapes into the nature, out of town – nothing spectacular, all very insignificant, unimportant celebrations of life that has gone, by now, and remains only as a record in these personal, brief sketches.
You keep a diary and the diary will keep you. – Mae West, to Peter Beard (From the film).
Jonas Mekas
EVERY FRIDAY
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
1971–1972, 16 mm film, 82 min
The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex during my first years in America, mostly from 1950–1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Willamsburg.
The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semenis¹kiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming; you see some of the places we used to know; you see some of the field work, and other insignificant details and memories. You don’t see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in 25 years.
The third part begins with a parenthesis in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, where we spent a year in a forced labor camp during the war. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna, where we see some of my best friends – Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. You also see the Monastery of Kremsmuenster, the Stammdorff castle of Nitsch, the house of Wittgenstein, etc. The film ends with the burning of the Vienna fruit market, August 1971.
Jonas Mekas
EVERY SATURDAY As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
2000, 16 mm film, 288 min.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a record of subtle feelings, emotions, daily joys of people as recorded in the voices, faces and small everyday activities of people I have met, or lived with, or observed – something I have been recording for many years. This, as opposed to the spectacular, entertaining, sensational, dramatic activities which dominate much of the contemporary film making.
Now, all of this has to do with my understanding of what acts really affect the positive changes in man, society, humanity. I am interested in recording the subtle, almost invisible acts, experiences, feelings, as opposed to the tough, harsh, loud, violent activities and political actions, and especially, political systems of our time.
As a filmmaker, I am taking a stand for the politics that have been practiced by some of the artists of my generation who believe that more essential, positive contributions to the upholding and furthering of the best in humanity, have been made, say, by John Cage or Albert Camus, and not by great political figures of the 20th century.
The film is not conceived as a documentary film, however. It follows a tradition established by modern film poets. I am interested in intensifying the fleeting moments of reality by a personal way of filming and structuring my material. A lot of importance is being given to color movement, rhythm and structure – all very important to the subject matter I am pursuing. I have spent many years developing and perfecting a way of catching the immediacy without interfering with it, without destroying it. I believe that some of the content that I am trying to record with my camera and share with others, can be caught only very indirectly through the intensity of personal involvement.
Jonas Mekas
EVERY SUNDAY
Biographical Quartet:
Zefiro torna or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas
1992, 16 mm film, 34 min.
Images from the life of George Maciunas. Includes footage I took of George in 1952 at his parents’ house, with his father, mother and sister Nijole², fragments of Fluxus performances, picnics with friends (Almus, Warhol, Lennon, Yoko Ono, etc.), George’s wedding and footage I took of him in Boston Hospital three days before his death. The soundtrack includes Monteverdi, and myself reading from my diaries written during the last ten months of George’s life.
Jonas Mekas
Happy Birthday to John
1996, 16 mm film, 24 min.
On October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono’s art, designed by the Master of the Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art, curated by David Ross. The same day an unusual group of Yoko Ono’s friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krasner, and many others gathered to celebrate John’s birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event. We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by Ringo, John, Yoko and their friends, not as a clean studio recording but as a birthday party singing, free and happy. There are other images included in the film, such as John and Yoko’s party at Klein’s (their agent), John and Yoko’s concert at Madison Square Garden, August 1972, the Central Park Vigil after John was shot, and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko. The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the birthday party singing, contains John’s comments on his own 8mm filmmaking, his “home movies”. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujokaitis, the amazing percussionist of the Free Music of the Second Street group.
I consider this film my manifesto for the non-industrial (thank you, Peter Kubelka, for the term) cinema and non-industrial music. All singing and music in this film is non-studio, from real life, and all images are just as they came from my Bolex, “unedited”, that is, edited in the camera.
Jonas Mekas
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol
1990, 16 mm film, 35 min.
Music by the Velvet Underground recorded in 1966. Opening segment taped at the Dom at the public performance with Nico. End section: mass for Andy Warhol at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The film is made up of my family diaries relating to Andy Warhol from the years 1965–1982. The locations are New York and Montauk (The Factory, House of George Maciunas, Village Gate, Psychiatrist’s Convention, home of Stephen Shore, The Warhol Estate, Montauk, etc.). The “cast” includes: Lou Reed, Nico, Eddie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Barbara Rubin, Tuli Kupferberg, Peter Orlovsky, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Vincent Friemont, Henry Geldzahler, Paul Murrissey, Karen Lerner, Jay Lerner, Peter Beard, John Kennedy Jr., Lee Radziwill, Tina Radziwill, Anthony Radziwill, D’Alessandro, Caroline Kennedy, Mick Jagger, Jade Jagger – and many others.
Jonas Mekas
This Side of Paradise.
1968/1999, 16 mm film, 35 min.
Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of the late 60s and early 70s, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic death John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition, life without the father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began.
The images in this exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousin Anthony and Tina Radziwills in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. These were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These were days of Little Fragments of Paradise.
Jonas Mekas
Letter From Greenpoint.
2004, video film, 8 min.
In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in Soho, I made the decision to leave Soho and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a place in which I’ve spent more time than any other place, and which was also a place of my family life, I am somewhere else now. It’s also about beginning to let roots [grow] in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts, experiences.
But this video is also about video. I will let Dominique Dubosc, my good Paris friend, talk for me, in a recent letter:
I think you finally mastered this bloody video camera that was for so long (still for most people) no more than a tape recorder. Now it is the eye-camera the Kinoks had been dreaming of. Of course, it is not only a question of mastering the camera. What is more important is the energy behind. The movement of life embracing death itself. It gave me such a push that I feel on the move again. Thank you.
What Dominique meant, and what I mean, is this: When in 1949 I began filming with my Bolex, it took me fifteen years to really master it, so that my Bolex could do for me anything I wanted. When in 1987 I got my first Sony camera I thought it would be different. But no. Only today, after working with the video camera for 15 years, I feel like it had become an extension of my eye, my body, my first real video work.
Jonas Mekas
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION.
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNIAL
ROOM 4
BIOGRAPHICAL ROOM.FILMS ABOUT JONAS MEKAS
Jonas in the Desert
By Peter Sempel, 1994, 120 min.
Celebrations
By Dominique Dubosc, 2002, 38 min.
My Country is Cinema. Scenes from the Life of Jonas Mekas
By Brigitte Cornand, 1999, 58 min.
New York – My Dog
By Kristijonas Kuc¹inskas and Vytautas V. Landsbergis, 2004, 30 min.
As I
By Neria Lejay and Alexandre Perrier, 2002, 17 min.
Meanwhile a Butterfly Flies
By Julius Ziz, 2001, 52 min.
Laboratorium Anthology
By Jonas Mekas, 1999, 62 min.
Self-Portrait,
By Jonas Mekas, 1980, 20 min.
MAYA | STENDHAL | GALLERY 545 W 20th St., NY T 212.366-1549 www.mayastendhalgallery.com
Deutsch
Venice Program
JONAS MEKAS
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESSLITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNALE
ROOM 1
Home Videos
1987–1995, video installation
I got my first video camera in 1987. By that time I had used up four Bolex cameras. I felt I had reached the end of what I wanted to do with a Bolex camera. I even began noticing that I was beginning to imitate myself. I had gone full circle. The time had come to go into something else. That something else was video. It took me some ten years to master my Bolex camera. I thought video would be much easier. It proved to be as difficult as film. Only now, after a good fifteen years of working with a video camera, am I beginning to feel really free, as I was with my Bolex. These early video diaries reflect a lot of my struggle to master the video camera in such a way that it would really catch life around me as truthfully and as personally as I want. It is not always that I have succeeded. But I have tried. I am presenting these diaries in an installation format, so that you could make your own movie out of this material by moving from one monitor to another and still another. A diary form is a very personal and open form of art. Have a good time!
Jonas Mekas
JONAS MEKAS
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNALE
ROOM 2
PRESENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH MAYA STENDHAL GALLERY, NEW YORK
Cassis
1966, 16mm film, 4 min.
Filmed at a higher-than-normal speed (using a setting which recorded less than the normal 24 frames per second), which allowed Jonas Mekas to film a sunset at Cassis, France, which plays back in only three minutes.
Jonas Mekas made the “short” film Cassis in the ancient fishing port of the same name in the South of France, during a visit to a friend, the filmmaker and visionary philanthropist Jerome Hill. Mekas was moved by the history of the site, its landscape and the light. From his room he could see the high ridge of rock that juts upward out into the sea, and below in the middle distance, a quai that extends from the town to a lighthouse, marking the entrance to the harbor of Cassis. He was attracted to the progress of the light of day, the movement of the clouds and water, the fixed position of the lighthouse as a kind of marker, the many sailboats passing in and out of the harbor.
Improvising a support for his Bolex in lieu of a tripod, he shot from just before sunrise until just after sunset, a frame or two every second or every few minutes, with a soundtrack of the ocean’s roar. Viewed from on high, as the film time speeds by, the sailboats that go in and out of the harbor resemble seagulls, and strollers move out along the quai to the lighthouse, then return. The filmed light is opalescent much of the time, an effect of the clouds scudding by and the reflection of the light. The sea appears to breathe, swelling with the movement of the tide, and as the sun comes nearer to setting, the clouds alter in their composition, illuminated from below. Finally, night falls, and all that remains is the stronger incident of light that is the essence of the lighthouse, and the relatively smaller lamps that border the quai.
Edward Leffingwell
Notes on the Circus
1966, 16mm film, 12 min.
Jonas Mekas films a circus experience from the viewers’/audience perspective, edits fragments of the 16mm film to produce images which dance and uses colors that flash across the screen. With musical accompaniment.
That same year, Mekas filmed the colorful, light and action-oriented Notes on the Circus, a carnivalesque riot of plumed dancers, trapeze artists and acrobats, horses, big cats, jugglers, stilt-walkers, flying doves, a flaming hoop, sequined costumes sparkling in the chiaroscuro produced by the impact of available light. He chooses the jug-band music popular at the time as an oddly appropriate, buoyant soundtrack.
Edward Leffingwell
Travels
1970, 16mm film, 7 min.
A compilation of images from five short travelogues when Jonas Mekas visited Italy, Russia, and Sweden.
Happy Birthday to John
1996, 16mm film, 24 min.
Jonas Mekas filmed a birthday party for John Lennon.
Constructed in segments, the very human Happy Birthday to John (24 minutes, 1996) offers ample evidence of Mekas’s long and mutually supportive association with fellow filmmakers John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There are kaleidoscopic glimpses of the famous, and a soundtrack that knits together disparate elements of a film journal conceived as a birthday tribute to Lennon. The film casually documents Lennon’s birthday in 1972, and includes footage of a Lennon/Ono concert in Madison Square Garden filmed that same year. Throughout, Lennon and Ono cavort, perform and hang out with such celebrities de jour as Viva, Jane Forth, Holly Woodlawn, Andy Warhol, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsberg and others, doing what ordinary people do as the camera points their way.
Edward Leffingwell
Elvis and Wien & Mozart
2001, 16mm film, 2 min.
Elvis’s last concert in New York (as opposed to his last concert ever). Jonas juxtaposes the music of Mozart with images of an Elvis concert.
Closely related in its extreme play of light and darkness is the one-minute Elvis (2001), commissioned by the 2001 Viennale Film Festival and made from footage from the last of a series of four New York concerts given by Elvis Presley in 1972, five years before his death. Jonas Mekas’s oddly elegant, near-parodic soundtrack is Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube, a nod to the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Electric in the lights of Madison Square Garden, Presley is ghostly, magnetic, at the top of his game, appearing before the adoring multitude to the tune of Richard Strauss’ anthemic Also Sprach Zarathustra, Kubrick’s introductory selection for 2001. When Mekas catches the white-suited Presley at a particular angle, as he turns, the singer’s head disappears in darkness.
Edward Leffingwell
Film for Maya: Father and Daughter
2005, video, 4,5 min.
Jonas Mekas filmed a four-and-a-half minute video of his two cats nurturing each other. Dedicated to Maya Stendhal.
JONAS MEKAS
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNIAL
ROOM 3
NON-STOP FILM SCREENING PROGRAMS
EVERY TUESDAY
Diaries, Notes & Sketches a.k.a. Walden
Filmed 1964–1968, edited 1968–1969, 16mm film, 180 min.
Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shot nothing. When one writes diaries, it’s a retrospective process: you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down. To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant. Either you get it now, or you don’t get it at all. To go back and shoot it later, that would mean restaging, be it events or feelings. To get it now, as it happens, demands the total mastery of one’s tools (in this case, Bolex). It has to register the reality to which I react and also it has to register my state of feeling (and all the memories) as I react. Which also means that I had to do all the structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera. All footage that you’ll see in the Diaries is exactly as it came out from the camera: there was no way of achieving it in the editing room without destroying its form and content.
Walden contains materials from the years 1964–1968, strung together in chronological order. For the soundtrack I used some of the sounds I collected during the same period: voices, subways, much street noise, bits of Chopin (I am a romantic), and other significant and insignificant sounds.
They tell me I should be always searching; but I’m only celebrating what I see. (from the soundtrack)
I make home movies – therefore I live. I live – therefore I make home movies. (from the soundtrack)
Jonas Mekas
EVERY WEDNESDAY
Lost, Lost, Lost
Filmed 1949–1963, edited 1976, 16mm film, 2 h 58 min
These six reels of my film diaries come from the years 1949–1963. They begin with my arrival in New York in October 1949. Reel One and Reel Two deal with my life as a Young Poet and Displaced Person in Brooklyn. It shows the Lithuanian immigrant community, their attempts to adapt themselves to a new land and their desperate efforts to regain independence for their native country. It shows my own frustrations and anxieties and the decision to leave Brooklyn and move to Manhattan. Reel Three and Reel Four deal with my life in Manhattan on Orchard Street and East 13th St. First contact with the New York poetry and filmmaking communities. Robert Frank shooting The Sign of Jesus, Leroy Jones, Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara reading the Living Theatre. Documentation of the political protests of the late 50s and early 60s. First World Strike for Peace. Vigil in Times Square. Women for Peace. Air Raid protests. Reel Five includes Rabbit Shit Haikus, a series of haikus filmed in Vermont; scenes at the Film-makers’ Cooperative, filming Hallelujah the Hills; scenes of New York city. Reel Six contains a trip to Flaherty Seminar; a visit to the seashore in Stony Brook; a portrait of Tiny Tim; opening of Twice a Man; excursions to the countryside seen from two different views, that of my own and that of Ken Jakobs whose footage is incorporates into this reel.
The period I’m dealing with in these six reels was a period of desperation, of attempts to desperately grow roots into the new ground, to create new memories. In these six painful reels I tried to indicate how it feels to be in exile, how I felt in those years. These reels carry the title Lost, Lost, Lost, the title of the film myself and my brother wanted to make in 1949, and it indicates the mood we were in, in those years. It describes the mood of a Displace Person who hasn’t yet forgotten the native county, but hasn’t gained a new one. The sixth reel is a transitional reel where we begin to see some relaxation, where I begin to find moments of happiness. A new life begins. What happens later you’ll have to see in the next installment of reels…
Jonas Mekas (March 31, 1976)
EVERY THURSDAY
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of his Life
1969/1985, 16 mm film, 150 min
A continuation of my film diaries. The footage covers the period from 1969 to 1984. During the same period I shot much more footage than what you see in He Stands… I am including in this film only the most impersonal footage. Originally, I was planning to call this film Anthropological Sketches. It consist of scenes, sketches of people, activities, happenings, events outside – or almost outside – of my life which I am observing from a slight distance. There are some sketches that are from personal life, I include them to balance, to warm up the impersonal material. There will be two more films from the same period: one will include all my “personal” material (home, friends), the other all my “abstract” material.
The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with, places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow, blizzards, etc.), many of my filmmaker friends such as Hans Richter, Rossellini, Marcel Hanoun, Adolfo Arrieta, Henri Langlois, Cavalcanti, Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, Kenneth Anger, Kuchars, Breer, Willard Van Dyke, Frampton, etc., or just friends, such as John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Lee Radziwill, John Kennedy Jr., & Caroline, Tina and Anthony Radziwill, Peter Beard, Andy Warhol, Richard Foreman, P.Adams Sitney, Yoko Ono, Raimund Abraham, Hermann Nitch, Allen Ginsberg, George Maciunas, and countless others – streets and parks of New York – brief escapes into the nature, out of town – nothing spectacular, all very insignificant, unimportant celebrations of life that has gone, by now, and remains only as a record in these personal, brief sketches.
You keep a diary and the diary will keep you. – Mae West, to Peter Beard (From the film).
Jonas Mekas
EVERY FRIDAY
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
1971–1972, 16 mm film, 82 min
The film consists of three parts. The first part is made up of footage I shot with my first Bolex during my first years in America, mostly from 1950–1953. It shows me and my brother Adolfas, how we looked in those days; miscellaneous footage of immigrants in Brooklyn, picnicking, dancing, singing; the streets of Willamsburg.
The second part was shot in August 1971, in Lithuania. Almost all of the footage comes from Semenis¹kiai, the village I was born in. You see the old house, my mother (born 1887), all the brothers, goofing, celebrating our homecoming; you see some of the places we used to know; you see some of the field work, and other insignificant details and memories. You don’t see how Lithuania is today: you see it only through the memories of a Displaced Person back home for the first time in 25 years.
The third part begins with a parenthesis in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, where we spent a year in a forced labor camp during the war. After the parenthesis closes, we are in Vienna, where we see some of my best friends – Peter Kubelka, Hermann Nitsch, Annette Michelson, Ken Jacobs. You also see the Monastery of Kremsmuenster, the Stammdorff castle of Nitsch, the house of Wittgenstein, etc. The film ends with the burning of the Vienna fruit market, August 1971.
Jonas Mekas
EVERY SATURDAY
As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
2000, 16 mm film, 288 min.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty is a record of subtle feelings, emotions, daily joys of people as recorded in the voices, faces and small everyday activities of people I have met, or lived with, or observed – something I have been recording for many years. This, as opposed to the spectacular, entertaining, sensational, dramatic activities which dominate much of the contemporary film making.
Now, all of this has to do with my understanding of what acts really affect the positive changes in man, society, humanity. I am interested in recording the subtle, almost invisible acts, experiences, feelings, as opposed to the tough, harsh, loud, violent activities and political actions, and especially, political systems of our time.
As a filmmaker, I am taking a stand for the politics that have been practiced by some of the artists of my generation who believe that more essential, positive contributions to the upholding and furthering of the best in humanity, have been made, say, by John Cage or Albert Camus, and not by great political figures of the 20th century.
The film is not conceived as a documentary film, however. It follows a tradition established by modern film poets. I am interested in intensifying the fleeting moments of reality by a personal way of filming and structuring my material. A lot of importance is being given to color movement, rhythm and structure – all very important to the subject matter I am pursuing. I have spent many years developing and perfecting a way of catching the immediacy without interfering with it, without destroying it. I believe that some of the content that I am trying to record with my camera and share with others, can be caught only very indirectly through the intensity of personal involvement.
Jonas Mekas
EVERY SUNDAY
Biographical Quartet:
Zefiro torna or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas
1992, 16 mm film, 34 min.
Images from the life of George Maciunas. Includes footage I took of George in 1952 at his parents’ house, with his father, mother and sister Nijole², fragments of Fluxus performances, picnics with friends (Almus, Warhol, Lennon, Yoko Ono, etc.), George’s wedding and footage I took of him in Boston Hospital three days before his death. The soundtrack includes Monteverdi, and myself reading from my diaries written during the last ten months of George’s life.
Jonas Mekas
Happy Birthday to John
1996, 16 mm film, 24 min.
On October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono’s art, designed by the Master of the Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art, curated by David Ross. The same day an unusual group of Yoko Ono’s friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krasner, and many others gathered to celebrate John’s birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event. We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by Ringo, John, Yoko and their friends, not as a clean studio recording but as a birthday party singing, free and happy. There are other images included in the film, such as John and Yoko’s party at Klein’s (their agent), John and Yoko’s concert at Madison Square Garden, August 1972, the Central Park Vigil after John was shot, and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko. The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the birthday party singing, contains John’s comments on his own 8mm filmmaking, his “home movies”. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujokaitis, the amazing percussionist of the Free Music of the Second Street group.
I consider this film my manifesto for the non-industrial (thank you, Peter Kubelka, for the term) cinema and non-industrial music. All singing and music in this film is non-studio, from real life, and all images are just as they came from my Bolex, “unedited”, that is, edited in the camera.
Jonas Mekas
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol
1990, 16 mm film, 35 min.
Music by the Velvet Underground recorded in 1966. Opening segment taped at the Dom at the public performance with Nico. End section: mass for Andy Warhol at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The film is made up of my family diaries relating to Andy Warhol from the years 1965–1982. The locations are New York and Montauk (The Factory, House of George Maciunas, Village Gate, Psychiatrist’s Convention, home of Stephen Shore, The Warhol Estate, Montauk, etc.). The “cast” includes: Lou Reed, Nico, Eddie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Ed Sanders, Barbara Rubin, Tuli Kupferberg, Peter Orlovsky, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Vincent Friemont, Henry Geldzahler, Paul Murrissey, Karen Lerner, Jay Lerner, Peter Beard, John Kennedy Jr., Lee Radziwill, Tina Radziwill, Anthony Radziwill, D’Alessandro, Caroline Kennedy, Mick Jagger, Jade Jagger – and many others.
Jonas Mekas
This Side of Paradise.
1968/1999, 16 mm film, 35 min.
Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of the late 60s and early 70s, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic death John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition, life without the father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began.
The images in this exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousin Anthony and Tina Radziwills in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. These were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These were days of Little Fragments of Paradise.
Jonas Mekas
Letter From Greenpoint.
2004, video film, 8 min.
In February 2004, after 30 years of my life in Soho, I made the decision to leave Soho and move to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This video is about what it feels like to leave a place in which I’ve spent more time than any other place, and which was also a place of my family life, I am somewhere else now. It’s also about beginning to let roots [grow] in a new place, new home, with new friends, new thoughts, experiences.
But this video is also about video. I will let Dominique Dubosc, my good Paris friend, talk for me, in a recent letter:
I think you finally mastered this bloody video camera that was for so long (still for most people) no more than a tape recorder. Now it is the eye-camera the Kinoks had been dreaming of. Of course, it is not only a question of mastering the camera. What is more important is the energy behind. The movement of life embracing death itself. It gave me such a push that I feel on the move again. Thank you.
What Dominique meant, and what I mean, is this: When in 1949 I began filming with my Bolex, it took me fifteen years to really master it, so that my Bolex could do for me anything I wanted. When in 1987 I got my first Sony camera I thought it would be different. But no. Only today, after working with the video camera for 15 years, I feel like it had become an extension of my eye, my body, my first real video work.
Jonas Mekas
CELEBRATION OF THE SMALL AND PERSONAL IN THE TIMES OF BIGNESS
LITHUANIAN PAVILION.
51. INTERNATIONAL ART EXHIBITION, VENICE BIENNIAL
ROOM 4
BIOGRAPHICAL ROOM.FILMS ABOUT JONAS MEKAS
Jonas in the Desert
By Peter Sempel, 1994, 120 min.
Celebrations
By Dominique Dubosc, 2002, 38 min.
My Country is Cinema. Scenes from the Life of Jonas Mekas
By Brigitte Cornand, 1999, 58 min.
New York – My Dog
By Kristijonas Kuc¹inskas and Vytautas V. Landsbergis, 2004, 30 min.
As I
By Neria Lejay and Alexandre Perrier, 2002, 17 min.
Meanwhile a Butterfly Flies
By Julius Ziz, 2001, 52 min.
Laboratorium Anthology
By Jonas Mekas, 1999, 62 min.
Self-Portrait,
By Jonas Mekas, 1980, 20 min.
MAYA | STENDHAL | GALLERY 545 W 20th St., NY T 212.366-1549 www.mayastendhalgallery.com