Actualités

Far from the factory of Hollywood, American film culture would never have made it this far without its greatest advocate. Jonas Mekas was the most important cinephile in film history. His legacy contained multitudes: wartime refugee, New York movie buff, daring exhibitor, revolutionary critic, boundary-pushing filmmaker, poet, musician, wine connoisseur, the center of every party. Until his death at the age of 96 this week, the Lithuanian-born immigrant remained a resilient embodiment of the essential link between creating, and advocating for creativity, in all facets of life.

At the closing-night party for the New York Film Festival in September, Mekas stuck around until 1 a.m., hanging with the likes of Julian Schnabel, Louis Garrel, and Ed Lachman. Mekas acolytes were everywhere, across multiple generations of film history, and they delighted at the opportunity to spend time by his side.

I once drank wine with Mekas for two hours in his Greenpoint...

Jonas Mekas, the Lithuania-born filmmaker who started Film Culture magazine and the organization that became New York’s Anthology Film Archives, died Wednesday. He was 96.

Anthology Film Archives wrote on Instagram, “He will be greatly missed but his light shines on.”

His first feature was 1962’s “Guns of the Trees,” while 1964’s “The Brig” won the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Prix. As a cinematographer, he shot avant-garde films including much of Andy Warhol’s “Empire.”

Mekas was a pioneer of trying new approaches to film as art, and in 2007 released one short film each day of the year on the internet. His other, often autobiographical, films include “Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol,” “Letter from Greenpoint” and “Out-takes From the Life of a Happy Man.” As late as 2013, the 90-year old was making films like “Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland.”

He worked with artists such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono,...

Jonas Mekas, the avant-garde film icon who is widely considered one of the most important figures in experimental film history, has died at 96. Mekas’ passing was confirmed on social media by the Anthology Film Archives. The director co-founded the New York City center for film preservation and exhibition in 1970.

“Dear friends. Jonas passed away quietly and peacefully early this morning,” Anthology Film Archives wrote on Instagram. “He was at home with family. He will be greatly missed but his light shines on.”

Mekas, often referred to as “the godfather of American avant-garde cinema,” got his start curating experimental films in New York City in the 1950s. Along with his brother Adolfas, he co-founded the American film magazine Film Culture in 1954, and by the 1960s he was directing his own features, including “Guns of the Trees” (1962) and “The Brig” (1964). The latter title won the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Prix. Mekas was also a notable cinematographer,...

In 1983, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with Media Study/Buffalo, created a touring retrospective of avant-garde films, primarily feature-length ones and a few shorts, which they called “The American New Wave 1958-1967.” To accompany the tour, a hefty catalog was produced that included notes on the films, essays by film historians and critics, writings by major underground film figures and more.

The retrospective was created at a time when financially viable independent filmmaking was on the rise, such as films made by John Sayles, Wayne Wang and Susan Seidelman. According to the co-curators of the retrospective, Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins, the objective of the tour was to:

provide a more adequate picture than conventional history affords us of a rare period of American cinematic invention and thereby prepare a coherent critical and historical context for the reception of the new work by the current generation of independent filmmakers.

In 1966, as the underground film wave was sweeping the country, a Boston off-shoot of New York City’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque opened at a performance space at 53 Berkeley Street. Underground films were shown on weeknights, while on the weekends the space transformed into a music venue called The Boston Tea Party.

The Cinematheque and the Tea Party were founded and run by a controversial figure named Mel Lyman, a harmonica player and the leader of a hippie commune in Boston’s Fort Hill neighborhood. Lyman has also been considered a cult leader on par with Charles Manson, except Lyman’s followers never actually murdered anyone. According to the book Apocalypse Culture, Lyman claimed to be an extraterrestrial and was seemingly obsessed with “ruling” the country’s underground culture.

Whatever Lyman’s background, the Cinematheque showed some cool films, according to the actual flyers from that time period below. Click each poster...

Jonas Mekas, 'the godfather of avant-garde cinema', talks to Sean O'Hagan about working with Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Jackie Kennedy

Jonas Mekas, who will be 90 on Christmas Eve, has an intense memory of sitting on his father's bed, aged six, singing a strange little song about daily life in the village in which he grew up in Lithuania.

"It was late in the evening and suddenly I was recounting everything I had seen on the farm that day. It was a very simple, very realistic recitation of small, everyday events. Nothing was invented. I remember the reception from my mother and father, which was very good. But I also remember the feeling of intensity I experienced just from describing the actual details of what my father did every day. I have been trying to find that intensity in my work ever since."

We are sitting at a table in...

Following rampant Internet speculation, Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has received official confirmation and lots more detailed information regarding the films of Jonas Mekas that will be released on DVD in 2012.

Mekas’ films will indeed be released by a trio of Paris-based organizations — fashion icon agnes b., DVD distributor Potemkine and avant-garde film distributor Re:Voir — and are scheduled to come out in November. A box set collection, pictured above, will only contain a selection of Mekas films: Lost, Lost, Lost; The Brig; Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania; Walden; As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty; and a DVD of Mekas’ shorter films.

However, the DVDs will also be sold separately and several other films will also be made available through Re:Voir, including Guns of the Trees, Mekas’ first film.

Most exciting, though, is that all the DVDs will be released as Region...

It was only through an enigmatic public Facebook post that it was revealed that a nearly comprehensive DVD box set of the films of Jonas Mekas was in the works. The post only showed the above image with the words “Coming Soon!” But, coming soon from whom and for where?

On Facebook, there was also a link to a DVD page on Mekas’ official website that offered a bit more clues. The release appears to be a collaboration between the French fashion designer agnes b., the French independent DVD label Potemkine and the French distributor Re:Voir, which has released Mekas’ work on VHS for years.

The Potemkine website lists Mekas’ films as individual upcoming DVD releases with no set dates. There appears to be no listing for the box set image that was posted to Facebook.

Most disappointingly, though, is that the Potemkine product pages indicate that the DVDs will be Zone 2, i.

This Week’s Absolute Must Look is a series of film stills from Storm de Hirsch’s documentary about Jonas Mekas making his documentary of the performance of The Brig in 1964. So that’s what a filmmaker shooting with a film camera looks like!Aryan Kaganof had an unpleasant experience at a European film festival. Maybe it’s just me, but I think his comment to Bela Tarr is funny.Jason Kupfer has a snazzy new filmmaker website, which I’ve been meaning to link to for awhile, so I guess it’s new-ish.Dominic Deacon’s nunsploitation feature Bad Habits got reviewed on the site Scaryminds and received a 3 out of 5 on the sex and violence scale.The site Bad at Sports interviews filmmaker Jesse McLean.J.J. Murphy reviews Azazel Jacob’s feature Terri, marking it along the filmmaker’s inching closer to the mainstream. Or is there something...

Photo on the right: ©Syd M

Updated through 6/3.

"Seminal avant-garde filmmaker and retired Bard College professor Adolfas Mekas, who co-founded Film Culture magazine with his brother and fellow filmmaker Jonas Mekas in 1955 and taught at Bard for 33 years, died this morning from an unexpected heart problem," reports indieWIRE's Eric Kohn. He was 85. "After immigrating from Lithuania with his brother in 1949, Mekas played a key role in the New American Cinema movement that congealed around the publication of Film Culture. He produced several experimental features, including the acclaimed 1963 love triangle comedy Hallelujah the Hills, which played at the Cannes Film Festival that year."

Richard Roud, who programed the film for the first edition of the New York Film Festival in 1963, call this story of two men in love with the same woman a "satire on the American way of life, and at the same time a hymn to the joys of youth and friendship.

Us film producer who became an innovative London cinema owner

David Stone, who has died aged 78, played significant roles both in radical Us film-making of the 1960s and in Britain's golden age of arthouse cinemas in the 1970s. In 1974, David and his wife, Barbara, acquired the former Classic cinema, at Notting Hill Gate, west London, which they transformed and renamed the Gate. They opened their own distribution company, Cinegate, whose first acquisition was three films by the young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); and Fear Eats the Soul (1974). The first Fassbinder films to be shown in Britain, these brought the Gate instant critical and box-office success at its opening in September that year.

The Gate often enjoyed success with films others had passed over, including La Cage Aux Folles (1978), and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan...

If it’s Christmas Eve, then it must be another birthday for the godfather of underground film, Jonas Mekas! He turns 88 today, having been born in the town of Semeniškiai, Lithuania on Dec. 24, 1922. To celebrate, please watch the above embedded excerpt from his classic film Walden, aka Diaries, Notes and Sketches, which comes courtesy of the distributor Re:Voir. They also sell the full version of the film.

This feels like an especially apropos film to embed today given the blustery, cold opening. However, about halfway through this excerpt, the wind and the chill eventually gives way to, like life, springtime and pretty girls.

Walden was Mekas’ first major compilation of his film diaries and covers the period of his life from 1964 to ’68. Previously, he directed the fictional narrative Guns of the Trees and a film documenting a performance of the Living Theater’s controversial play The Brig; as well as releasing short diary-like pieces,...