Jonas Mekas 1922-2019
– filmmaker & organiser –
died at a respectable age… one of our heroes in the early sixties leading a movement of truly experimental use of camera, footage and projection, Lithuanian emigré tot he US in 1949, founder of the New York Filmmakers Coop… showing us that a camera does not need to be hold steady, that film can be kept as a raw capture of casting and reflecting of lights… turning “failed” footage into art… footage that would be thrown by most people who consider themselves cineasts… thus communicating the sensuality our senses may experience when exposed to the flickering of light and shadow and the wind blowing in a microphone.
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I hear in my minds ear the rattling sound of 16 mil projectors and I travel back to these murky places where half a century ago the Filmmaker Coop movies where shown…(unlike the grandiose museum retrospectives theat befell him in the last decade). Then I had no means then to visit NY, but saw his and related movie material of the NY Coop in London in gigs organised by the London Filmmakers Coop… at that time we did make a Dutch version for distributing ‘projecatble materials’, de Nederlandse Filmmakers Coöpertatie (its headquarters with Piet Verdonk in Eindhoven)…
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projectable material is the right term because what Mekas ‘cum suis’ did stand for was not meant to compete in anyway with the standard cinema formats we are used to… it brought into being a new autonomous audio-visual medium.
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This tableau I just made in his honour… a link to an excerpt of his 1969 movie Walden on Vimeo goes hereby…
the limping messenger 