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HomeJonas Mekas (b. 1922) graduated from college in 1944, and a mere two months later he faced incarceration of an unimaginably more brutal sort: He was sent to a labor camp just outside of Hamburg as one of the Nazis' POWs. He is therefore far more justified than the average person in using the metaphor of slavery to describe his involvement with New Cinema, beginning in the 50s.
At that point he invented the film column at the Village Voice in New York, calling it his "Movie Journal". These entries (as collected in Mekas' 1972 book of the same name) trace decades of a self-inflicted obsession, which eventually left the writer too exhausted to continue working for the newspaper at all.
Mekas also founded the journal Film Culture in 1955; shot his own film diaries that he left unedited for years; screened others' works and consequently was arrested at least once on obscenity charges; and began the Filmmaker's Co-op in 1962.
When he and his brother landed in New York, their last choice of a place to go, neither knew much English. Lithuanian, the writer's native tongue, is like all Baltic languages in that it has no ties to the familiar Romance or Slavic structures and pronunciations. Because of that, Mekas felt that as a writer he could not reach out. He decided (as later reported in a 1973 New Yorker article) "that the cinema was the tongue in which we could reach everybody."
At first, Mekas resisted the second flowering of avant-garde filmmaking, and even wrote against it from a neorealist standpoint. He was almost sued for libel! It was in the Voice columns that he slowly converted himself to the religion of New Cinema. The double whammy of John Cassavetes' Shadows and Leslie and Frank's Pull My Daisy tipped the scales at last.
Meanwhile, the Mekas brothers were living on free gourmet food samples and rice, while trying to raise money to make their own film -- without getting arrested for shooting without a permit. There were more screenings and obscenity charges. Jonas claimed that if everyone could sit through Andy Warhol's Empire there would be no more war. But it slowly became more difficult to tell porn from art and narrative from experimental. Everyone began to feel set adrift.
By the late 60s, the bankruptcies and legal hassles were allayed by the Film Art Fund. This made the Anthology Film Archives possible. To this day Mekas still publishes, acts as patron of the cinematic arts and works on his own films.
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