JONAS MEKAS
an ode to light’s impression shot frame by frame in each variation along a whole day, a film not far from becoming an impressionist painting. Or Notes on the Circus (1966), where consecutively shot images each afternoon acquire the consistency of memories while recording the show’s colors and motions. Jonas Mekas moves along the boundaries of marginal and independent cinema, and is himself part of the underground film movement in New York City. His active participation in this intellectual environment soon transformed him into a point of reference for all the avant-garde movements, both in the visual arts and in experimental cinema, and even within the literary field. Finally, Mekas shares the concerns that would fuel his search since the time he was travelling in Europe. The founding of the magazine “Film Culture,” in 1954, his column “Movie Journal,” between 1958 and 1976 —a weekly space in The Village Voice devoted to reviewing experimental productions of the time—, the creation of the Film-Makers Cooperative, in 1961, and the founding of the New American Cinema group, in 1958 —which gathered Peter Bogdanovich, Emile de Antonio, Robert Frank, Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, among others—, exemplify Mekas’ active participation in these key times for American culture. Within that artistic scope, alongside newspapers as well as written and filmed notes, Mekas conceives works that are explicitly political and irreverent, such as Time and Fortune Vietnam Newsreel (1968), mise-en-scène for an interview with the War Minister of Lapland about the Vietnam War; or Film Magazine of the Arts (1963), a news report commissioned by a magazine that ended up being terribly provocative.
The Brig (1964) is an original case of film adaptation from Kenneth Brown’s play by the same name. Mekas conceives a document very close to cinema verité. It is no more and no less than a hand-held camera portrait of brutality in a US Marine Corps jail. Jonas Mekas is pierced by intellectual restlessness and artistic curiosity, but fundamentally it is life itself and the set of diverse experiences that become a work of art when examined and developed within the creative order of an exquisite sensitivity. Mekas’ artistic proposal is in some sense secretly revolutionary, given that the rupture of conventions and rules of art constitutes a secret premise in his whole work. Presenting part of his works at FICUNAM —through a retrospective and an art exhibition— allows us an entrance into a universe that when spied upon and attended to cannot let us leave exactly as we were before. Inspiration and contagion, curiosity and courage, traveling with Mekas is associating in an adventure leading towards that ideal nation where lucidity and intransigence are cultivated as indispensable virtues in order to be in the world. Eva Sangiorgi
Guns of the Trees (1962) is his first fiction film, based on a poem by Stuart Perkoff, and featuring Ben Carruthers (actor in John Cassavetes’ Shadows), a film that portrays the experience of young beatniks, mixing up past and present and transferring their poetics into fiction.
232 TERRITORIOS: JONAS MEKAS
TERRITORIOS: JONAS MEKAS
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