Jonas Mekas 100!
Please note : this season finished in Jan 2023
“I live… therefore I make films. I make films… therefore I live.” Jonas Mekas (Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches)
On Christmas Eve 1922, in a tiny farming village in north-eastern Lithuania, filmmaker, poet, and artist Jonas Mekas was born. From these humble beginnings, he would emerge as an unlikely yet pivotal figure whose influence on twentieth century art, cinema and culture would extend internationally.
In celebration of the centenary of his birth, we will be screening Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1976), which depicts Jonas and his brother Adolfas’s return journey to their homeland after several decades in the United States and Outtakes from the Life of a Happy Man, a look back on fragments of unused 16mm footage, combined with immediacy and intuition.
As the central node of avant-garde film in the United States, he had an inestimable impact on people like Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Shirley Clarke, John Waters and Martin Scorsese, to name just a few. Over his 96 years, Mekas’s long list of accomplishments—including founding Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives—complemented his own achievements as a poet, diarist, artist and, perhaps most importantly, filmmaker. Jonas Mekas 100! is a completely original series of his lesser-known films, curated to bring the joy, beauty and sense of wonder integral to his cinema to audiences across the United Kingdom.
Jonas Mekas 100! UK Cinema Tour is curated by Herb Shellenberger. The project is delivered by the Lithuanian Culture Institute and the Independent Cinema Office with the support of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Cultural Attaché in the UK. Special thanks to RE:VOIR (Pip Chodorov), the Estate of Jonas Mekas (Sebastian Mekas) and Julius Ziz for their cooperation.
