Jonas Mekas

Experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas has made more than one hundred films and has played an active role in New York’s avant-garde film community for more than fifty years. He started the journal Film Culture in 1954; began writing criticism for the Village Voice in 1958; and, in 1969, cofounded Anthology Film Archives, a screening space, museum, and library in New York.

During World War II the Lithuanian- born Mekas was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp because of his Slavic heritage; he managed to escape, but ended up living in refugee camps in Germany for four years. His time spent watching films in the camps fostered a lifelong interest in cinema. When Mekas arrived in New York in 1949, he began making a documentary about the experience of being displaced by war. Although he never fully realized the project, his footage points to the loneliness of his immigrant status. His subject matter soon expanded to include unscripted records of his personal life and the New York art scene, as well as poetic and fantastical sequences. To assemble the six-reel opus Lost Lost Lost, Mekas selected passages from hours of material shot between 1949 and 1963, including his earliest documentary-style material. The resulting film constitutes a journey of artistic and personal self-discovery; in successive reels a gestural and expressive style emerges, and by the end the air of loneliness begins to ease. As the artist has explained, “By reel six one cannot say that I feel lost anymore; paradise has been regained though cinema.”