Arrested For Showing A Film
Jonas Mekas and The Avant Garde

Who Is Jonas Mekas?

Curator, writer and filmmaker Jonas Mekas is the godfather of American avant-garde filmmaking, or the New American Cinema, as he dubbed it in the late 1950s. The founder of Anthology Film Archives, the Filmmakers' Cooperative and Film Culture magazine, Mekas helped shape the public image of avant-garde filmmaking in America, as well as profoundly influenced its self-identity.

Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas spent the Second World War in displaced persons camps before emigrating to the United States with his brother, Adolfas, in 1949. He discovered avant-garde film at venues like Amos Vogel's pioneering Cinema 16, and began screening films himself in 1953. In 1954, Mekas published the first issue of Film Culture, America's iconoclastic answer to Cahiers du Cinéma. Originally devoted to auteurist criticism, featuring Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Herman Weinberg and many others, Film Culture ultimately became the mouthpiece of the American avant-garde. In 1958, Mekas began writing his "Movie Journal" column for the Village Voice, spotlighting the newest and most radical filmmakers in New York City. In 1962, he founded the Filmmakers' Cooperative (FMC) with Emile de Antonio, Shirley Clarke and others. The FMC remains in operation, with the world's largest circulating collection of avant-garde films. In 1964, Mekas founded the Filmmakers' Cinémathèque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. With Stan Brakhage, Ken Kelman and P. Adams Sitney, Mekas formed the Essential Cinema Collection in 1970, one of the first attempts to establish a canon of avant-garde film.

In addition to writing and curating, since arriving in the United States, Mekas has also worked as a filmmaker. His early narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1961) and documentaries (The Brig, 1963) are still highly regarded. Today he is best known for his signature diary films like Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost, (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania, (1972); and Zefiro Torna, (1992). Mekas calls himself a "filmer," a man who makes films about life. His films have screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. I spoke with Mekas earlier this year at Anthology Film Archives at 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue in New York City.
 

Arrested For Showing A Film?

And so it was that in in the early 60's Mekas began to arrange screenings with a new energy: first weekend midnight programs at the Charles Theater on Avenue B and East 12th Street in 1961 and subsequently at the Bleecker Street Cinema and the Gramercy Arts in 1963. The underground was coming into full flower and full visibility, not to say notoriety, with works in whch the tradition of social realism associated with New York was giving way to bizarre sexual extravaganzas--what in a Village Voice column, Mekas called "Baudelairean Cinema: "A world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh, a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty."

Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for screening Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, convincing Mekas of the need for an outlet for independent film more responsive to the filmmakers themselves. The film was seized by the district attorney's office and was subsequently banned in the state of New York. The prosecution of Flaming Creatures prompted the film's champions – notably Mekas and Susan Sontag – to mount a high cultural defense of it, attempting to legitimate its sexuality by framing it within discourses of censorship and high art. It wouldn't be Mekas' last arrest merely for showing film.

He was also arrest for Un Chant d'Amour. The story behind Mekas'smuggling of Un Chant d'Amour and his subsequent arrest for showing it was almost as exciting as the film itself. Mekas purposefully did not bring the film before the New York licensing board knowing full well that the film would be banned from exhibition.

“no legal body can act as an art critic”
Jonas Mekas, in a letter from jail

Jonas Mekas Filmography

1962
Guns of the Tree 75'

1963
Film Magazine of the Arts 20'

1964
The Brig 68'

1964
Award Presentation To Andy Warhol 12'

1965-66
Report from Millbrook 12'

1966
Cassis 4'

1966
Hare Krishna 4'

1966
Notes On the Circus 12'

1967
The Italian Notebook 15'

1968
Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel 4'

1969
Walden 180'

1971-2
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania 82'

1949-63/1976
Lost, Lost, Lost 180'

1966-78
Notes for Jerome 45'

1964-68/1978
In Between 52'

1979
Paradise Not Yet Lost (aka Oona's Third Year) 97'

1965/1983
Cup/Saucer/Two Dancers/Radio 23'

1966/1983
Street Songs 11'

1983
Erick Hawkins: Excerpts From Here and Now With... Lucia Dlugoszewski Performs 6'

1969-85
He Stands In a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life 160'

1965-1982/1991
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol: Friendships and Intersections 36'

1992
The Education of Sebastian or Egypt Regained (video)

1992
Zefiro Torna or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas 35'

1993
Mob of Angels (video)

1995
3 Imperfect Three Image Films 6'

1995
Quartet #1 5'

1995
Happy Birthday to John 18'

1996
Cinema Is Not 100 Years Old (video) 5'

1996
Memories of Frankenstein

1997
Birth of a Nation 80'

1997
Letters to Friends #1 (video) 88'

1997
Scenes from Allen's Last Three Days on Earth as a Spirit (video) 67'

1997
Symphony of Joy (video)

1999
This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography 25'

2000
As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty 320'

2000
Song of Avignon 8'

2000
Autobiography of a Man Whose Memory Was In his Eyes
 

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