Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas’s intimate diary film spans 1963 to 1990, capturing Andy Warhol alongside friends and collaborators from the New York avant-garde. Featuring figures such as Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and George Maciunas—as well as rare footage of the Velvet Underground’s first performance—it offers a personal portrait of Warhol’s world and his intersections with art, music, and counterculture.

Filmmaker José Luis Guerin documents his experience during a year of traveling as a guest of film festivals to present his previous film. What emerges is a wonderfully humane and sincere portrayal of the people that he meets when he goes off the beaten track in some of the world's major cities.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

The quixotic journey of Nam June Paik, one of the most famous Asian artists of the 20th century, who revolutionized the use of technology as an artistic canvas and prophesied both the fascist tendencies and intercultural understanding that would arise from the interconnected metaverse of today's world.

Experience the iconic rock band's legacy in the first major documentary to tell their story. Directed with the era’s avant-garde spirit by Todd Haynes, this kaleidoscopic oral history combines exclusive interviews with dazzling archival footage.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

Scenes from the life and work at Anthology Film Archives. Much of the footage in this video was shot by Auguste Varkalis.

In 1961 Lithuanian American artist and impresario George Maciunas established the avant-garde art movement Fluxus. George details the rise of Fluxus following a sensationalized tour of “concerts” in Europe in 1962, and continuing in New York for most of the 1960s and ’70s. During this time Maciunas was converting the dying industrial buildings of Soho into a network of artists’ lofts, creating one of the first official real estate co-ops of artist-owned buildings. Maciunas’s life and legacy—as recounted by artists of his generation, including Yoko Ono and Jonas Mekas—ignited debates that remain pivotal to artists working today.

A unique and compelling account of the day that changed the modern world, captured by ordinary people who chose to pick up their cameras and film that fateful day.

A surreal, half-fiction, half real life footage of a day in the life of John lennon and Yoko Ono, composed to music from John's historic 'Imagine' album and Yoko's 'Fly'.

For over 70 years, Jonas Mekas, internationally known as the "godfather" of avant-garde cinema, documented his life in what came to be known as his diary films. From his arrival in New York City as a displaced person in 1949 to his death in 2019, he chronicled the trauma and loss of exile while pioneering institutions to support the growth of independent film in the United States. Fragments of Paradise is an intimate look at his life and work constructed from thousands of hours of his own video and film diaries-including never-before-seen tapes and unpublished audio recordings. It is a story about finding beauty amidst profound loss, and a man who tried to make sense of it all... with a camera.

Filmed by Jonas Mekas from the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building, “Empire” explores the passage of time without the use of characters or a traditional narrative. The film, that consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building, was made from standard 1,200-foot rolls of 16mm film with a more than eight-hour runtime.

The tapes in the program consist of some of Mekas’ earliest cassettes from the 1990s not long after he first began working with video as well as more recent mini-DV tapes from 2010s. The contents of the tapes have not been previously seen in their entirety. The footage provides rare insight into aspects of Mekas’ video-making practice, as well as his activities, thoughts, dreams, and concerns, especially during the later years of his life.

A short film by Maria Lassnig, shot in 1970.

A tiny part of our (homonymous) homage for the minors master.

Home movies shot on Super 8mm by W+B Hein over 10 years.

Iconic American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol is the subject of this documentary, which looks at both his life and his influence on pop culture. The film provides details about Warhol's upbringing in Pittsburgh and follows his move to New York City, where he found massive success turning pop imagery into art and eventually founded "The Factory," his famed studio and party venue. Among the many notables interviewed are Dennis Hopper, David Hockney, and Roy Lichtenstein.

The last, and previously unreleased, filmed letters exchanged between Jonas Mekas, from his home in Brooklyn, and José Luis Guerin, from his apartment at the Escuela de Cine de Cuba.

Why are we still able, today, to view images that were captured over 125 years ago? As we enter the digital age, audiovisual heritage seems to be a sure and obvious fact. However, much of cinema and our filmed history has been lost forever. Archivists, technicians and filmmakers from different parts of the world explain what audiovisual preservation is and why it is necessary. The documentary is a tribute to all these professionals and their important work.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows his friend, film director Martin Scorsese, and his cast and crew, through various locations during the shooting of his film The Departed, released in 2006.

A home movie by Adolfas Mekas and wife Pola Chapelle on their travels to Lithuania and Europe. It was filmed concurrently with the more highly regarded “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” by Jonas Mekas, brother to Adolfas.

Filmmaker Gyula Gazdag's fascinating documentary follows Hungarian poet, playwright and activist István Eörsi on a trip to the streets of New York to visit his friend and contemporary, the iconic beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Shot just two years before Ginsberg's death, the film follows the two friends as they share poetry and laughs, wandering the streets of the Lower East Manhattan, musing about the past and contemplating the future.

Jonas Mekas reflects on summers spent in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Jackie Kennedy, her sister Lee Radziwill, and their families. Blending personal footage with diary narration, the film captures intimate moments of friendship, cinema, and healing in the years following John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

The film consists of continuous panning shots up a series of 367 human legs.

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

The story of Tiny Tim’s improbable rise to stardom is the ultimate fairytale - and so is that of his downfall. For a brief time, the shy and truly unusual outsider artist was the biggest star in the world.

In 1977, Robertas Verba followed Jonas Mekas in Lithuania, his second trip there after he left the country in 1944.

Takes an in-depth look at the lives and times of the people who hung out with Andy Warhol and "worked" at the Silver Factory during the Sixties, making it all click as a new counter-culture arose and began to exert its influence throughout the arts.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Gozo Yoshimasu, a pioneer of Japanese contemporary poetry, pursued the vision of his ally, the late Jonas Mekas in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The time is the end of January 2020, just before the coronavirus strikes NYC, and the trip is just in time. This film depicts the dramatic birth of a poem that could be called a requiem on the first anniversary of the death of Mekas, who was considered a giant of experimental cinema

During the 1970s I shot, helped to make, or commissioned about ten document films, mainly about film-makers. This film is one of them. It was made with Dan Ochiva, who acted as cameraman on about half of the footage. I shot the rest, and then edited the film. It is a record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O'Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon, James Cox. This footage will eventually become part of my film PEOPLE, PLACES, THE 1970S. –R. H.

The 29-minute experimental film Christmas on Earth caused a sensation when it first screened in New York City in 1964. Its orgy scenes, double projections and overlapping images shattered artistic conventions and announced a powerful new voice in the city's underground film scene. All the more remarkable, that vision belonged to a teenager, 18-year-old Barbara Rubin. A Zelig of the '60s, she introduced Andy Warhol to the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan to Kabbalah and bewitched Allen Ginsberg. The same unbridled creativity that inspired her to make films when women simply didn't, saw her breach yet another male domain, Orthodox Judaism, before her mysterious death at 35. Lifelong friend Jonas Mekas saved all her letters, creating a rich archive that filmmaker Chuck Smith carefully sculpts into this fascinating portrait of a nearly forgotten artist. An avante-garde maverick, a rebel in a man's world, Barbara Rubin regains her rightful place in film history.

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance, sculpture, and opera, reconstructing Mailer’s hypersexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation, alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.

I made this video June 23, 2001, as a letter for my good friend Penny Arcade who some days earlier had asked me why I love New York. I truly love New York! This letter to Penny Arcade is my love letter to New York.

The films were made between 1964 and 1966 at Warhol's Factory studio in New York City. Subjects were captured in stark relief by a strong key light, and filmed by Warhol with his stationary 16mm Bolex camera on silent, black and white, 100-foot rolls of film at 24 frames per second. The resulting two-and-a-half-minute film reels were then screened in 'slow motion' at 16 frames per second.

A “Cinéma, de notre temps” series episode directed by french filmmaker Jackie Raynal, originally aired 29 May 2016.

Shot in 1960 on the set of Jonas Mekas' 'Guns of the Trees'. Dedicated to Ron Rice.

"A Mixtape for Stom" is an intimate documentary portrait of Japanese experimental filmmaker Stom Sogo (1975–2012), whose frenetic Super-8mm works became emblematic of New York’s underground cinema at the turn of the millennium. A close friend, filmmaker Adrian Goycoolea reflects on Sogo’s life and legacy, framing the film as a reply to the final email he received from him. Drawing from personal archives, interviews, and memory, the film assembles a collage of Sogo’s art and presence: radiant, restless, and unresolved. Contributors include Jonas Mekas, Bruce McClure, Raha Raissnia, Julius Ziz, Ed Halter, Andy Lampert, and members of Sogo’s family, offering perspectives on his talent, struggles, and influence. Scored by Joe Watson of Stereolab, "A Mixtape for Stom" is at once an elegy and an act of remembrance; a meditation on friendship and grief, and a testament to an underground legacy that continues to reverberate.

Iimura creates a short self-portrait as well as brief portraits of five of his peers: Brakhage, Vanderbeek, Smith, Mekas and Warhol. In each portrait, Iimura attempts to copy the styles and traits of each artist (Vanderbeek's constantly moving camera; Mekas' experiments with film speed; Warhol's use of flashes of white against a black background), while briefly commenting on the images being shown. The film serves effectively as an introduction to the film styles of these artists.

In memory of the Japanese earthquake on 3.11, each director presents a 3 minute and 11 second short film in tribute to those who were lost that day.

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

Self Discovery for Social Survival is a collaborative surf and music film produced by Brooklyn based record label, Mexican Summer and Pilgrim Surf + Supply, a New York based surf and outdoor brand. Filmed in Mexico, the Maldives and Iceland in three separate vignettes, musicians (Allah Las, Connan Mockasin, Andrew Van Wyngarden of MGMT, and Peaking Lights) alongside pro-surfers,embark on a journey that combines a symbiotic relationship between music and the waves, the environment, and local culture. Poetically narrated by the legendary avant-garde film maker Jonas Mekas.

Elio Gelmini interviews Avantgarde filmmaker Kenneth Anger. With archive footage of Angers films, he portrays the filmmaker from his childhood until present day.

For some time I had been thinking about doing something with my Paris footage, of which I have many many hours. So [curator Danièle Hibon’s] suggestion [to make a new work celebrating 20 years of cinema at the Jeu de Paume museum] came just in time. I spent some three months going through my Paris footage and I managed to reduce it to the length you will be seeing, two hours and 39 minutes. It was very very hard to do so. I have so many friends in Paris, so many memories – and it’s all on video. So this is my love letter to Paris. To its streets, to the river Seine, to its cafes, bistros, bars, to the jambon de Paris, and, especially, to all of you, my Paris friends!

Explores the complex relationship between the spirit, body, and mind. The film is a nightmare with closed eyes because it counts among the most terrible moments of my life, my second exile, which lasted a very long time. Inspired by an ancient Hindu legend.

A young woman stands by a car while scenes from metropolitan life flash by.

The amazing adventures of forgotten American novelist and Paris Review founder, Harold Louis "Doc" Humes. His story is crammed full of ideas, about utopia, marijuana, literature, protest, paranoia and mental illness.

I Had Nowhere To Go is based on Jonas Mekas’s diary. It’s been over 70 years since he left his village in Lithuania to escape Nazi persecution. He was 22 years old. Today he is one of the last surviving members of a displaced generation and one of the greatest documenters of the human experience.

It Came from Kuchar is the definitive, feature documentary about the legendary, underground filmmaking twins, the Kuchar brothers. George and Mike Kuchar have inspired two generations of filmmakers, actors, musicians, and artists with their zany, "no budget" films and with their uniquely enchanting spirits.

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An experimental short by Beth B. It consists of rapidly intercut close-ups of talking heads reading statements from a Sigmund Freud case history; affidavits attesting to the atrocities of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi war criminal; and journals from the trial of New Yorker Joel Steinberg, accused of killing his adopted daughter.

An avant-garde documentary film on English guitarist, composer and improviser Fred Frith.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

In the 1960s, beat poet and experimental filmmaker Piero Heliczer helped shape New American Cinema, and was enmeshed with iconic filmmaker Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground at the very start of their careers. Through interviews with family and friends, found photos, and archival footage, Piero’s daughter, Thérèse Casper, explores the promise and perils of leading an authentic, creative life, and the impact that it can have on the people you leave behind in the process. Wondering if she can make peace with her absent father if she can find a connection to him through his art, she explores the artistic legacy and life of a man she never knew.

Adaptation of an avant-garde play about Rhoda, a hysterical heroine who feels oppressed by the people around her. She suffers through her birthday party, goes to see a doctor, plans a vacation, argues a lot and even breaks the fourth wall.

“Drawing on his personal archives, Mekas has assembled a Fluxus vaudeville starring Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and the late Nam June Paik. Most of the material is relatively recent although Ben Vautieur shows some early 1960s work to hilarious effect and Mekas channels Fluxus founder George Maciunas throughout.” – J. Hoberman, VILLAGE VOICE

Jonas Mekas weaves an elegiac diary film from his 1971–72 return to Lithuania, chronicling a visit to his birthplace of Semeniškiai after decades in exile. Blending personal memory with documentary observation, the film becomes both a portrait of homecoming and a meditation on displacement, family, and the passage of time.

A newsreel of Jonas Mekas shooting his filmed version of The Brig on the set of the Living Theatre production.

Using the words and ideas of great filmmakers, from archival interviews with Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Bresson to new interviews with Mike Leigh, David Lynch, and Jonas Mekas, Oscar-winning filmmaker Chuck Workman shows what these filmmakers and others do that can't be expressed in words - but only in cinema.

Two artists, whose work was constrained during the Soviet era, fled to New York. There, they met with their guru Jonas Mekas, the creator of avant-garde filmmaking. He led the way into the bohemian circles and helped them to discover creative freedom.

A short documentary profile of the Anthology Film Archives, shot on the eve of the move to the historic 2nd Avenue Courthouse. Staff and patrons are interviewed, and films preserved by Anthology are spotlighted.

During the trip back to Lithuania, Jonas Mekas made Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, Adolfas Mekas made Going Home, while Pola Chapelle, Adolfas’ wife, made this Journey to Lithuania, which both Jonas and Adolfas said was the best of these three films.

This distinctly personal journey into the artistic possibilities of independent film is not to be missed. Jonas Mekas, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Robert Kramer and many other visionaries and mavericks of the silver screen – as well as a book seller, a critic and a psychoanalyst – discuss what cinema has meant to them, what it is and what it could be and, implicitly, how it has changed over the 18 years in which this film was shot. Director Boris Lehman leads the charge, drawing in moments of absurdist humour and inventive camera work; he keeps things raw and spontaneous. His encounters with the now much-missed Jean Rouch and Stephen Dwoskin are particularly touching and stand testament to their personal playfulness and candour. An engaging, absorbing, epic odyssey of a movie.

Jonas Mekas came to Paris in October 1997 for the video release of his film Walden. I filmed the event and its twists and turns at the Cinémathèque, the Fnac, the École des Beaux-Arts, and in a few bars and restaurants. The film ends with some Halloween footage. Music by Bruno Geoffroy and Andrew Rogers, Call Me the Breeze.

Jem Cohen's memory-tribute to Jonas Mekas displaces its first-person narration from voice-over to on-screen text. Diaristic New York street imagery from 2015 mingles with the red roses of Lithuania and a 'makeshift memorial' to this beloved figure of the avant-garde.

From the diaries. This was filmed on July 1, 2004. From the cycle of FIRST FORTY I made in late 2006 as an introduction to my work for my new, Internet audience. All of them are based on my earlier films but slightly, sometimes more than slightly, changed. I consider them works complete in themselves, seperate from the main body of my film work.

This documentary cracks open the meticulously constructed façade of Andy Warhol, exposing the complex figure behind the soup cans and Marilyns. Director Tania Goldenberg traces the transformation of Andrew Warhola, a shy, churchgoing son of Pittsburgh immigrants, into the silver-wigged icon who redefined modern celebrity while deliberately maintaining a lifelong mask. Behind the iconic person...

Jonas Mekas reflects on his life.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

A short portrait of Jonas Mekas on the occasion of his 2002 retrospective in Paris (for his 80th birthday). Through film clips and interviews, Mekas recounts his arrival in America, his early life in New York and his first filmmaking experiences. An introduction to his life and work.

An autobiographical diary film assembled from unused footage shot between 1960 and 2000, interwoven with reflections, music, and glimpses of family, friends, city life, and travel. Mekas transforms these fragments into a poetic celebration of memory, happiness, and the passing of time.

Icon of pop art, Andy Warhol has marked the 20th century. This film pays tribute to him with the exceptional participation of Ultraviolet, never-before-seen images of the "private" Warhol and archival documents from the Velvet Underground, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Truman Capote.

“New York plays itself, as Taylor Mead and Winifred Bryan regale in pas de deux among the trashcans and the towers. The Studiedly Goofy and the Monumentally Grand are joined in masterly pas de don’t [...] The awed couple do battle with the status quo and teach the world to dance on the head of a bin. Rice detects real dignity in Bryan and amazing grace in Mead as they essay solitary promenades through the parks, subways and streets of a wintery New York landscape. Photographed and directed by Ron Rice, edited and scored by Taylor Mead.” –Edward Leffingwell

An intimate portrait of the superb actress Gena Rowlands, icon of independent cinema. Together with her husband, legendary director John Cassavetes (1929-89), she lived an unusual life beyond the dream factory, a life in which reality and fiction were so perfectly intertwined that it made possible films that still today seem incredibly real.

Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler reflects on the 1960s pop art scene in New York.

A tribute to Jonas Mekas' late friend and patron, Jerome Hill. Filmed on 16mm across three visits to Hill’s estate in Cassis, France, the film plays out as a tender visual diary of memory, passing time, and artistic exile. While the film focuses on daily life rather than explicit sexuality, it breathes with queer history. Hill was a closeted gay philanthropist who used his immense wealth to shelter and fund underground, heavily queer creatives. Mekas captures the warm, intimate atmosphere of this sanctuary, featuring legendary gay avant-garde icons like Warhol superstar Taylor Mead and actor Charles Rydell. Dedicated "to the wind of Lithuania" and featured in the 1979 Whitney Biennial, the film ultimately stands as a beautifully soft, authentic time capsule of a safe haven built by and for mid-century queer radicals.

Created by Anthology’s Archivist John Klacsmann, the visual track of Elegy for J.M. is the result of an encoding malfunction while preparing a clip of Jonas Mekas’s Lost Lost Lost (1976), a happy digital accident in keeping with the spontaneity and openness to chance embodied by Jonas’s diary films themselves.

Stephen Smith sets out to discover the real Andy Warhol - in the hour-by-hour detail of his daily life.

The life and work of Fluxus artist George Maciunas as seen in clips filmed between 1952 and 1978.

Jonas Mekas reflects on a 1966 trip to Avignon that offered solace during a period of personal crisis. Combining diary texts read by Angus MacLise with images of place and memory, the film becomes a lyrical meditation on pain, survival, and the restorative power of reflection.

In his latest film, Mekas shares what he describes as “a valentine to Yoko Ono,” done in his signature diaristic style. Mixing the familiar 16mm film with DV video, he offers a fly-on-the-wall look at intimate moments spent with one of the foremost artists of that era, including performances by Ono and new footage of her recent work—a testament to her endurance and the friendships she has made and kept over the years.

Various unrelated vignettes, often juxtaposing sound and image.

The immediately recognisable voice and sweet wistful words of the late legend of the avantgarde, Jonas Mekas, is heard over the images of an imagined trip to Mexico. He speaks about memory as being testament to suffering, while expired 16mm film shows us an act of remembering, memory as a verb: peaceful protest.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas follows the surrealist artist around the streets of New York documenting staged public art events.

Documentary on Jonas Mekas and the American avant-garde cinema, with several new interviews and appearances and over 100 excerpts and examples. Detailed sequences on Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Peter Kubelka, Bob Downey, Su Friedrich, and Anthology Film Archives.

Screen test for Andy Warhol, 1966

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celebrate cinema’s 50 year existence, they put together a side program showcasing the medium in all its shapes and forms: surrealist film, absolute film, dadaist films, abstract film,… The side program would soon become a festival in its own right: ‘EXPRMNTL’, dedicated to experimental cinema, and would become a mythical gathering of the avant-garde…

A film tribute to the inspirational Jonas Mekas.

"My last image of Jonas."—Ken Jacobs

Co-director Robert Margolis stars as Robert, an actor who may or may not be himself in this intense and often hilarious film about acting, aging and the dark side of ambition. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, The Definition of Insanity was filmed over the course of 18 months, as a documentary crew follows Robert Margolis obsessively from one failed audition to another, recording in raw detail his every humiliation and small triumph as he searches for that elusive perfect role that will catapult his career into the next level. Just when it seems that he will be forced by family and financial pressures to give up everything he has worked for, he meets legendary filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich («The Last Picture Show», «Papermoon»). That encounter changes his life profoundly, but in a very different way than he had anticipated.

The film tells about the famous Lithuanian director Vytautas Žalakevičius. The film contains many excerpts from the director's films and conversations with him. Here he talks about life, creativity and about himself. Vytautas Žalakevičius is remembered by his friends and associates.

Jonas Mekas' "Cinématon" No. 1590, directed by Gérard Courant on December 14, 1992, in Paris, France.

This was filmed in the Bronx on July 17, 1993. It includes writings on train passage walls created by many classic graffiti artists of c. 1993 (although by now all covered by new writers). The guide: Ivory. From the cycle of FIRST FORTY I made in late 2006 as an introduction to my work for my new, Internet audience. All of them are based on my earlier films but slightly, sometimes more than slightly, changed. I consider them works complete in themselves, seperate from the main body of my film work.

A portrait movie of the Godfather of American avantgarde cinema. Through material filmed primarily in the 1990s by both the directors and Jonas Mekas himself, a new insight appears on the filmmaking Lithuanian New Yorker who doesn't consider himself someone who makes films but a filmer.

Documentary on Andy Warhol's cinema of the sixties, made for Channel 4 in association with The Factory, MOMA and the Whitney Museum of Art and in collaboration with Simon Field.

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.

International Cast of Actors: Jonas Mekas, from Lithuania, poet and film-maker; Louis Brigante, from Madagascar, poet and publisher; Storm De Hirsch, from Holland, poetess, seer and film-maker; Pola Chapelle, from Tierra del Fuego, singer and motel operator; Adolfas Mekas, from Lapland, basket weaver and film director; Contessa Angela Maria Andrecci di Castiglione, from Italy, opera singer.

The film icon/Andy Warhol darling is interviewed is his legendary cluttered apartment.

During the course of a single winter’s day, January 16, 1966, Jonas Mekas captured impressionistic glimpses of people playing and working in Central Park and around the city on 16mm film. The kaleidoscope of skaters, strollers, vendors, and animals creates a multitude of patterns, while on the soundtrack Mekas comments candidly on the nature of cinema.

Maya Deren is a legend of avant-garde cinema. This authoritative biography of the charismatic filmmaker, poet and anthropologist features excerpts from her pioneering Meshes of the Afternoon and her unfinished documentary on Haiti, interviews with Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, and recordings of her lectures. Narrated by actress Helen Mirren, this definitive documentary offers startling insights into one of the most intriguing, accomplished figures in cinema history.

Filmed during Jonas Mekas’s visit to Avila in 1967, this short records his impressions of the city, inspired by Meher Baba’s teaching that it was one of Europe’s holy places. The footage was later incorporated into his 2003 compilation film Travel Songs (1967–1981).

Experimental movie about Jonas Mekas spending time in Budapest.

Opening of the Internet Saga Pavilion. At Palazzo Foscari Contarini, Venice. May 6 and 7, 2015.

Jonas Mekas' video letter to John Hanhardt, in which he declines an offer for Anthology to be taken on by the Guggenheim, insisting that they must maintain their hard-won independence. Many years ago, Jonas gave a copy to Ed Halter (of Light Industry); we think of it often.

The astonishing story of the first documentary film school in the USA—The Institute of Film Techniques at The City College of New York. This groundbreaking program exposed thousands of working-class kids raised on Hollywood movies to the power of documentary film - all under the watchful eye of DADAist, pioneering experimental filmmaker and radical thinker, Hans Richter.

"I developed a need to try to retain everything I was passing through, by means of my Bolex camera."

Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.

A narrative presented non-chronologically of Jonas Mekas's time in German forced labour camps and displaced person camps from 1944 to 1949, in which he quotes his diaries, as well as the German wartime writer Wolfgang Borchert.

Four-part video made in 2003 and 2004. The first two parts were presented at the Venice Biennale of 2003 as part of the Utopia Station project. An open-ended video -- more parts may be added to it in the future -- my thoughts on the idea of utopia. My thoughts on it change as time goes, as I am trying to figure it out for myself, the meaning of it, the practice of it, the possibility of it, in the past, today and in the future.

This is a video record of the Buddhist Wake ceremony at Allen Ginsberg's apartment. You see Allen, now asleep forever, in his bed; some of his close friends; and the wrapping up and removal of Allen's body from the apartment. You hear Jonas' description of his last conversation with Allen, three days earlier. You see the final farewell at the Buddhist temple, 118 West 22nd Street, New York City, and some of his close friends: Patti Smith, Gregory Corso, LeRoy Jones-Baraka, Hiro Yamagata, Anne Waldman, and many others.

Using his trademark flicker method, Ken Jacobs pays homage to the oldest type of color film, Kodachrome (whose production was discontinued in 2009) and to Jonas Mekas, who managed to breathe life into Kodachrome.

The film documents an encounter at 202 Blvd Saint-Germain, in a cafe underneath Apollinaire's last place of residence. Jean-Jacques Lebel gives Jonas Mekas (who remains off screen), three objects associated with Apollinare: an autographed book, a Futurist manifesto, and one of Apollinaire's last drawings.

As I was preparing the soundtrack from my film As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, I was video-taping myself doing it. This is a glimpse of an independent film maker at work. From the cycle of FIRST FORTY I made in late 2006 as an introduction to my work for my new, Internet audience. All of them are based on my earlier films but slightly, sometimes more than slightly, changed. I consider them works complete in themselves, seperate from the main body of my film work.

Jonas, Birgit and Anja are leaving for the Brooklyn Bridge. By taxi, buying beer, drinking in the street, joking, running, dancing on the bridge. It was a very funny afternoon.

In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.

A look into the many lives of Christa Päffgen, otherwise known as Nico; from cutie German mädchen to the first of the supermodels, to glamorous diva of the Velvet Underground, to cult item, junkie and hag. Many faces for the same woman, whom, you realize, just couldn't bring herself to care enough to live.

After the author’s period of experimentation, these American notes are extremely straightforward. As in Migration, however, this America could be a more remote country, and the inspiration is avowedly Japanese (Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North). Implicitly, the film-maker compares himself to an old peddler of drawings, Sam, hawking his wares at the entrance of Columbia’s Butler Library.

A series of video letters between José Luis Guerín and Jonas Mekas.

In 1969, Leonardi traveled to the United States to write a book about the New American Cinema. Using a Super-8 camera, he made a film-diary of this experience between New York and San Francisco. During his journey, the director’s love for experimental cinema was shaken by overwhelming political events, which forged a profound social conscience.

In 2008, Andrew Lampert, employed as the film archivist of Anthology Film Archives, endeavored to ask Jonas Mekas, its legendary and charismatic founder, one trivial or profound question a day. This is a selection.

Presents an intimate view of four decades of the Swiss-born artist Robert Frank who has had an extraordinary influence on contemporary photography and filmmaking. This documentary which examines his life through his films and photographs, includes interviews with many of his collaborators and contemporaries. Written, directed and edited by Philip Brookman, Amy Brookman

Jonas Mekas talks about December 24th, his birthday.

A short lecture by Jonas Mekas

Quartet Number One (1991) 8 min.

Filmmaker Alyssa Bolsey stumbles on a treasure trove of vintage cameras, old film reels, fading photos, technical drawings and boxes of documents that belonged to her great-grandfather Jacques Bolsey. Among the many boxes, she spots an old movie camera with the word "Bolex" embossed on its side and a dangling tag with the date, "1927." Entranced, she embarks on a journey to reveal how Jacques aimed to disrupt the early film industry with a motion picture camera for the masses.

From the diaires This was taped during the editing of my film As I WasMoving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. It shows how I work, edit, and tape. It is a glimpse into my way of working. From the cycle of FIRST FORTY I made in late 2006 as an introduction to my work for my new, Internet audience. All of them are based on my earlier films but slightly, sometimes more than slightly, changed. I consider them works complete in themselves, seperate from the main body of my film work.

In March and April of 1966, Markopoulos created this filmic portrait of writers and artists from his New York circle, including Parker Tyler, W. H. Auden, Jasper Johns, Susan Sontag, Storm De Hirsch, Jonas Mekas, Allen Ginsberg, and George and Mike Kuchar, most observed in their homes or studios. Filmed in vibrant color, Galaxie pulses with life. It is a masterpiece of in-camera composition and editing, and stands as a vibrant response to Andy Warhol's contemporary Screen Tests. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2001.

This was taped on the last day of the 20th Century, while having my last espresso of the century at Cremcafe, Second Avenue. I talk about the 20th Century. From the cycle of FIRST FORTY I made in late 2006 as an introduction to my work for my new, Internet audience. All of them are based on my earlier films but slightly, sometimes more than slightly, changed. I consider them works complete in themselves, seperate from the main body of my film work.

I close the 365 Day Project and announce the 1001 Nights Project ---HASTA LA VISTA! ---

Four four-minute image sections and four four-minute sound sections are linked in all combinations of the sound sections with each of the image sections. This established affinities between each of the image sections to the others, and the sound sections to each other. The image sections are: surveyors measuring the land near my house as seen through an old window, a family of Siamang Gibbon apes in the Washington zoo, an industrial site, and a page turned from a book on Cézanne’s composition showing a diagram of his painting Mardi Gras, filmed against bright leaves. The sound sections are: a dramatic scene from Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande”, a passage from William Wordworth’s autobiographical poem “The Prelude,” sounds from rowing on a lake at night, and the sounds of the apes vocalizing.

New York Conversations is a documentary made of varied conversations revolving around cinema in New York. These conversations give us the opportunity to sketch some of the bad boys and girls -directors, actors or producers of New York cinema, whether they be famous, anonymous or blossoming talents. Young and impetuous for most, they are watched over by a few veterans. All share this iron will to remain independent, out of choice but above all, out of necessity. The necessity to create at any cost. Shot with a Super8 camera, this documentary groups together 15 short conversations about film making, life, independence, art and...New York.

Evoking the physiognomy of a Rembrandt portrait, Axiom of Choice depicts Jonas Mekas and his son Sebastian, their heads rotating in radiant chiaroscuro against a black ground. With Mekas at its center, the references to cinematic machinery abound in this work: from the proto-filmic zoetrope (which used a spinning cylinder to create the illusion of a moving image), to the flickering zoom of Ernie Gehr’s film Serene Velocity, to the enormous gyrating machine at the center of Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale. —Richard Birkett, Karin Schneider & Nicolás Guagnini

For some twenty years Mars Bar, on the corner of First Street and Second Avenue, Manhattan, has been my bar. That's where we went for beer and tequila whenever we had to take a break from our work at Anthology Film Archives, and it was also a bar where most of those who came to see movies at Anthology ended up after the shows. We always had a great time at Mars Bar. It was always open, there was always the juke box, and very often there was no electricity, and it was old and messy and it didn't want to be any other way — it was the last escape place left downtown New York. So this is my love letter to it, to my Mars Bar. Mars Bar as I knew it.

Biker Click procures lovely willing young women for decadent millionaire playboy Kendall Harvey III. Kendall sets his sights on Peggy Johns as his next conquest, but the married and straight-laced Peggy turns down his proposal. However, after her husband's advertising business finds itself in a financial slump, Kendall offers to help out but only if Peggy agrees to be his intimate companion for two days.

A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.

MICHAEL SNOW UP CLOSE was produced on the occasion of The Michael Snow Project, a major, career-spanning, multi-venue retrospective of the artist. The documentary celebrates the multi-faceted shape of Snow's creative genius, including glimpses of his work in painting, sculpture, film, photo-works, performance, installations, and holography. Discussions with Snow, original documentation of his music and performance work, and excerpts from his avant-garde films, are complemented by interviews with filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Bruce Elder, Snow's dealer Av Isaacs, the architect Eb Zeidler, museum director Pierre Théberge, curator Louise Dompierre, and others. A deliberately conventional documentary about a deliberately unconventional artist.

Provides a rare glimpse into the world of George and Mike Kuchar, underground filmmaking brothers from the Bronx. Get to know the Kuchars, casually hanging out with John Waters at a party, looking at old yearbook photos with their high school classmate Gerard Malanga. Sit in on an extensive interview with the brothers at Anthology Film Archives.

Compiled from two decades of travels through Europe, Jonas Mekas’s Travel Songs gathers five diaristic segments filmed in Avila, Stockholm, Moscow, and Assisi. Shot with his characteristic spontaneity and playfulness, the film turns casual sightseeing into a lyrical meditation on place, memory, and movement.

... with real-life portraits of Jayne Mansfield, Frak O'Hara, Ruth Ford, Ned Rorem, Virgil Thomson, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Rudy Gernreich, Jonas Mekas and others.

The real history of the cinema is the invisible history – history of friends getting together doing the thing the love – for us the cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector. With every new buzz of our cameras our hearts jump forwards, my friends! ―Jonas Mekas

Alexander Kluge - October 22 2016

"It came to my mind that I should try and locate George Capsis"

A behind-the-scenes look at the man behind the trophy and the poisons that taint an otherwise jubilant jamboree.

MM Serra and Jonas Mekas sign a paper in 3D.

A wholesome moment: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra, Ken Jacobs, and Flo Jacobs take lavender from a stranger's bush.

Projecting films at the Film-Makers' Cinematheque on Bruce Conner, Andy Warhol and Harry Smith

On January 17th, downtown New york at PROTOTYPE Festival, I attended N.Y. premiere of a Lithuanian opera