Jonas Mekas

Born in Semeniškiai, Lithuania, on December 24, 1922, into a Jewish family,  Jonas Mekas  was interned with his brother, Adolfas, in a concentration camp by the Nazis, after the start of World War II. Both young men managed to escape, first to Denmark and then to the United States, where they settled in New York. “We were displaced, but the United Nations took care of us,” he recalled in an interview. “We were very lucky. That no longer happens. Today is a tragedy. In 1945 there was a universal agreement, but now everything doesn’t matter, the countries have become foolish and selfish”.

After becoming students of the German painter and filmmaker Hans Richter, they started Film Culture magazine, where Jonas continually wrote film reviews. He later served as a columnist for a Village Voice column that had a huge influence on the avant-garde scene in the City of Skyscrapers.

Two weeks after settling in the City of Skyscrapers, he managed to acquire his first camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, with which he began to record everything that happened around him. In 1964 he signed  The Brig,  a documentary about American prisoners in Japan, which won a special prize in Venice. An illustrious member of the avant-garde scene, together with characters like  Andy Warhol  or Yoko Ono, he especially liked Spain, as he filmed one of our great painters in  Salvador Dali At Work , where he follows him through the streets, while in  The Song of Avila  documents his trip to the city of Santa Teresa de Jesús.

In his enormous production, his diaries stand out, such as  Walden  (1969),  Lost, Lost, Lost  (1970) and above all  Reminiscences of a trip to Lithuania  (1972), considered his masterpiece. He explains his return to the Nazi labor camp from which he escaped, and to his hometown, which he hadn’t been to in 27 years. “I don’t shoot movies, I shoot what I see around me,” he explained on one occasion. His spirit is captured in a conversation with  Pier Paolo Pasolini  that he recounted in his volume “Notebooks of the sixties”. “We will take cinema away from the industry and give it to homes. That is the true meaning of what we call underground cinema”, Mekas explained to the director of  Teorema. “Yes, I said that,” she recalled years later. “However, Pasolini answered something better: ‘Every home has a typewriter and that does not mean that individuals write more and better.’ Cameras are like a pen in our pocket, one more tool to communicate but not necessarily a better one.”

In  As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty  (which can be translated as “while I was moving forward, I occasionally saw little glimpses of beauty”), from 2001, which lasts five hours, accumulates numerous recordings of various moments in his life . One of his great disciples, the Spanish  José Luis Guerin , made public in 2011 for the Pompidou Center in Paris, the pieces of his correspondence filmed with the director, which explain with images the close personal relationship between the two.

Among the numerous books and writings –the vast majority published in Spanish– by  Jonas Mekas  , his Anti-manifesto of cinema, created in 1996, a year after the Centennial of the Seventh Art, stands out –because it is not wasted. He extols the value of small films, compared to blockbusters. “100 years ago, God decided to create the movie camera. And he did it, ”explains the text. “So he created a filmmaker and said to him:“ Here is an instrument called a movie camera. Go out and film and celebrate the beauty of creation and the dreams of the human spirit, have fun.” But the devil didn’t like that. So he put a bag of money in front of the camera and said to the filmmaker: “Why do you want to celebrate the beauty of the world and its spirit if you can make money with this instrument?”