Jonas Mekas

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—Jonas Mekas is fond of saying that in Lithuania he is known as a poet; in Europe, as a filmmaker; and in America, as a maverick. He is all of those things, but the last has earned the 84-year-old, Lithuania-born filmmaker the epithet “Godfather of American Avant-Garde Cinema.”

It’s a title well deserved. Following the second world war, Mekas and his brother Adolfas emigrated to New York, where over the course of the next three decades, he pioneered the genre of Diarist Cinema, with films such as Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971-72). His works are lyrical mixtures of first-person experiences, fiction, documentary, commentary and experimentation.

An influential figure beyond his own films, he founded the groundbreaking magazine Film Culture in 1954, began writing for the Village Voice two years later, and co-founded The Film Makers Cooperative in 1962 and Anthology Film Archives in 1970. He has remained at the vanguard of filmmaking throughout his almost six-decade career, embracing new formats and continuing to experiment. His most recent project is a series of video Podcasts that he began on Jan. 1, 2007, for which he will post 365 short films over the course of a year.

Mekas is also the subject of a current exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York. Bringing together film, video and two series of stills, “Jonas Mekas: The Beauty of Friends Being Together Quartet” celebrates the filmmaker’s relationship with New York City and its personalities—from Andy Warhol and George Maciunas to John Lennon and Jacquelyn Kennedy.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the multi-channel installation Four Quartets (2007), composed of The Destruction Quartet, The Education of Sebastian, or Egypt Regained, Farewell to SoHo, and Martin Scorsese: An American Filmmaker at Work and offers Mekas’ impressions of everything from changing neighborhoods to Hollywood filmmaking to the events of 9/ll.

ArtInfo recently caught up with Mekas in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to discuss the P.S.1 exhibition, his thoughts on digital video and his impressions of contemporary New York.

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Jonas, your exhibition at P.S.1 marks the first time that the work in the installation Four Quartets have been shown together. When did you decide to incorporate them into one piece?

When [the curator] Phong Bui approached me about doing the exhibition, I was thought it would be a good idea to arrange it around the number four, and most of the pieces in the show are constructed more or less like quartets. There are 10 plasma screens, and each one of them shows fours pieces. Then there are 40 portraits and 40 New York images arranged in rows of 10 by four. It’s all in fours.

Each of the plasma screens plays a DVD of four pieces created from decades of footage. What was your editing process like when you were piecing them together?

I have thousand of images [from the films] collected on slides, and it is a reduction and elimination process. I am always joking with my friends that “Rimbaud had illuminations, but I have eliminations!” I begin with a huge amount and then I reduce, reduce, reduce until I have what I want.

I conceived the project for this exhibition as a dedication to New York and my friends, and how I love New York and I love my friends. It was easy to eliminate everything else and just stick to the subject of the show.

Speaking of huge projects, in January you started posting a series of 365 Podcasts to your Web site…

And I’m sticking to it!

I will reach the end, and after the end of 365 days, I may do 1,001 nights!

It seems like a very literary undertaking. What inspired the project?

It came about by chance. Maya Stendhal gallery, which represents me, had the idea to have an Internet site, www.jonasmekas.com, and besides all the earlier material that you can see on my site, I thought, “how can I deal with more current material?”

Then I remembered that many artists made a work every day. Petrarca wrote 365 poems to Laura, and the playwright Pirandello wrote 365 short stories—at least, he wanted to, but he did not finish.