Jonas Mekas
Still from Notes on Marie Menken
Courtesy of Mina Film
Jonas Mekas, one of the leading figures who helped shape the public image of avant-garde filmmaking in America, and who dubbed the category 'New American Cinema' introduces a screening programme as a contribution to the project 'Whatever Happend To Sex in Scandinavia?'.
Jonas Mekas was the editor and chief of Film Culture and wrote Movie Journal, a film column for the Village Voice. He is the co-founder of The Filmmakers' Co-operative (FMC) and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films, located in New York City. Among films made by Jonas Mekas are Guns of the Trees (1961), The Brig (1963), Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972), Zefiro Torna, (1992) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001). Jonas Mekas' films have been screened extensively and he received innumerous grants and awards, among them, New York State Council on the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.
Geography of the Body (dir. Willard Maas, 1943, 16mm, B&W, sound, 7 min) is an analogical pilgrimage that evokes the terrors and splendors of the human body as the undiscovered, mysterious continent. Un Chant D'Amour (dir. Jean Genet, 1950, 16mm, B&W, silent, 26.5 min) is the only film by the famed French writer Jean Genet. Based on his novel Our Lady of the Flowers, it depicts the fantasy of a gay male prisoner and that of his jailer. Window Water Baby Moving (dir. Stan Brakhage, 1959, 16mm, color, silent, 12 min) documents in a very loose and poetic but also frank way, the birth of Stan Brakhage's first child. Flaming Creatures (dir. Jack Smith, 1963, 16mm, B&W, sound, 45 min) by Jack Smith, one of the first proponents of the aesthetics of 'camp', is a travesty on Hollywood B movies and a tribute to the actress Maria Montez. The film was seized as pornographic and Jonas Mekas continued to champion the films cultural defense attempting to legitimate its sexuality by framing it within the discourse of censorship and art.
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