# Jonas Mekas (2020). *Jonas Mekas: Interviews*. : University Press of Mississippi. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[book]] > Title:: Jonas Mekas: Interviews > Author(s): [[Jonas Mekas]] > Year:: 2020 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: mekas_jonas_2020 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Jonas Mekas: Interviews](zotero://select/items/@mekas_jonas_2020) > ReviewedDate:: [[2023-08-28]] ## Citation ```latex [@mekas_jonas_2020] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@mekas_jonas_2020]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Annotation Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) is a filmmaker, film critic in USA, best known for his diary films and relationship to the American underground and New American Cinema. He was born in Lithuanian farming village of Semeniškiai on December 24, 1922. Mekas was active in resistance to both the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Lithuania. After liberation, the brothers were assigned for four years to displaced persons camps and they decided to leave to New York in late 1949. That was the moment a young poet and writer started his first 16mm Bolex film camera and began to record life in the Lithuanian émigré community in Brooklyn. ([[@mekas_jonas_2020]]) ### Notes: [[References/Authors/Jonas Mekas|Mekas]]의 경우 전통적인 시네마와 다른 것이 바로 아티스트와 도구, 그리고 메터리얼의 직접적 관계라고 생각했다. 그가 깐느에 보냈다는 “film evenings,”에 대한 답변을 보면 그는 “films,”을 감상하기 위해선 "not only the “film” but the film-maker and the equipment and, perhaps, technicians," 그의 생각은 시네마를 다른 형태의 performance라고 생각하는 것 같다. > “Here is another aspect where the new cinema differs from the traditional cinema—in this direct relationship between the artist, his tools, and his materials. I have said before that the camera has become the extension of the artist’s fingers, and the lens his third eye.” ([[@mekas_movie_2016]], 255) > > “The essential point here is that this is not one-sided activity: It’s an interaction. The camera movements are reflections of the body movements; the body movements are reflections of the emotional and thought movements—which, in their turn, are caused by what came in through the eye. A circle between the artist’s eye and the camera eye is established.” ([[@mekas_movie_2016]], 256) > > (May 22, 1969) What are the qualities that bind together, at least for me, the works of Michael Snow, Paul Sharits, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Joyce Wieland, George Landow, and the recent work of Robert Breer? Each in his particular way is preoccupied with a conscious manipulation of movement and light. ([[@mekas_movie_2016]], 352) > There are two different concerns. While the West Coast (Sears, Bartlett, Conner, De Witt, etc.) focused on the electric images, which dematerialise the reality, in the East Coast, the realist transformed into another kind of realiy, a field of energy, [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] energy. ([[@mekas_movie_2016]], 352) 그가 가지고 있는 [[post-production]] 의 대한 생각은 흥미롭다. 이 맥락에서 [[Jonas Mekas|Mekas]]는 Cliches가 아닌 다음으로 연결되기 위한 shot들이 아닌 situation들의 연속이라고 말한 Lady Bird와 그의 영상의 Editing은 다른 모습의 한 연결점으로 보인다. ![[@hattenstone_i_2019#^0d3947]] > JM: They take the same kind of stance as a Stalinist social realist attacking Picasso, or the Nazis attacking the German Expressionist artists. They say things like “your camera shakes,” or “you don’t know what you are doing,” or “you’re sloppy,” or “any child could do it.” They’re not really carrying on a serious discussion (p. 97). > Post-editing on the table is more a matter of eliminating what didn’t work. (p. 98) 특히나 흥미로운 것은 그가 표현하는 단어들이다. 예를들어 I cut out the badly written “paragraphs.” (p. 98) 이 말이 이해하기 쉽게 표현한 것인지 그가 실재로 영화를 언어적으로 이해하는지는 확실하지 않다. > Nonnarrative forms require a much more personal, intuitive and automatic kind of editing, and this can be done only during the shooting. (p. 98). 이에 대해서 질문자 Gerald Barrett 이 이러한 단어 사용 literary analogies에 대해서 물어보는데 [[References/Authors/Jonas Mekas|Mekas]]는 시네마는 다른 아트 Form과 구별을 해서 individuality, originality and the uniqueness를 주장해야할 시기가 지났다고 대답한다. 즉 현재에는 이미 많은 사람들이 시네마의 Inferiority complex를 주장할 필요가 없으며 모든 아트는 overlap하기에 이러한 more familiar 한 단어를 사용함으로해서 points of similarity를 찾는데 도움을 줄 수 있다고 이야기 한다. 왜 비서술적 형태는 더 개인적인 것으로 다가가게 되는 걸까? 일단 그가 설명하는 서술적 시네마는 작은 구조적 요소들을 모두 신경써야하고 그것은 주로 영화를 찍는 과정에서 샷 안에서 이루어진다. > The shot is structured by how the actors move within the frame, by the placement of the lights, by how the sound travels, by the pacing and the movements of the camera. All of this takes place during the shooting. Narrative directors have to be concerned with that: Antonioni, Hitchcock, Rossellini. So, there is always that kind of structuring during the shooting. ==So that the conception and practices of editing differ in the different forms of the same art: how you organize the smallest elements into the total structure==. (pp. 98-99) 하이라이트를 찍은 점은 에이젠슈테인 또한 매우 집중해서 이야기한 부분이기도 하다. [[References/Authors/Jonas Mekas|Mekas]]는 1973년 인터뷰에서 15-20년동안 그러므로 대략 1950년대 초반 혹은 후반부터 시네마는 여러 방향으로 나아갔다고 주장한다. 그리고 이 시기에 서술적 시네마 안에서도 여러가지 Diary 형식이 생성되었다고 이야기한다. non narrative의 다른 경향을 다시 강조하며 그렇기에 다른 방식으로 리뷰되어야 한다고 주장한다. > Cinema has been going into various directions in the last fifteen or twenty years. (p. 99) 그 대략적 종류로는 1. fictitious 허구적 ex) Stanton Kaye's Georg, [[Robert Bresson]]’s Diary of a Country Priest 2. 개인의 Day-to-day lives를 그리는 시네마 diary cinema -> 내러티브의 한 갈래다. 1. Warren Sonbert [https://vimeo.com/518799993/fca4c8de1e](https://vimeo.com/518799993/fca4c8de1e) 2. Andrew Noren 3. Gerard Malanga 4. Michael Stewart 5. Bob Branaman 6. Taylor Mead 7. Stan Brakhage 3. cinema poetry 1. Brakhage’s The Dead, Sirius Remembered, or Prelude 2. Anger’s Eaux D’Artifice and Fireworks 3. James Broughton’s [Mother’s Day and This Is it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgKKUhAStM4) 4. Baillie’s Castro Street, Mass, and All My Life 5. Bruce Conner’s A Movie and Report; 6. Belson’s [Samadhi](https://vimeo.com/121607109) (1967) and Chakra; 1. ![[The-Third-Eye-Magazine-Jordan-Belson-fillm-Samadhi-03.jpg|300]] 7. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures; 8. Robert Breer’s Eyewash and Fist Fight; 기본적으로 그가 구분하는 분류 체계는 내러티브와 비내러티브 영화다. (p. 103) 비록 그 분류에 복잡한 부분이 있지만 결국에 그는 개개인의 아티스트를 말할 수 밖에 없다고 말한다. #Comments 이 지점은 결국 들뢰즈가 시네마의 분류로 들어가기 전 파인아트에서는 개개인으로 접근한 것과 마찬가지이지 않을까? 들뢰즈는 왜 시네마에서만 개인적인 접근을 하지 않았을까? 개인당의 작업이 부족해서일까? ## An Interview with Jonas Mekas ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 28 · Location 400 The first avant-garde, the French one, succeeded in bringing the dream aspect into cinema. The novelistic cinema was broken into pieces through surrealism and this dream reality. The second avant-garde, which started in the United States, gave to this dream reality a formal [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] and succeeded in detaching the cinema from other arts. The main function of the third avant-garde, or underground cinema, is to free cinema from all other arts and develop a fuller poetic vocabulary. By now, the filmmaker is free to express himself in a film poetry almost as free as written poetry. ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 29 · Location 414 we say that the eyes are not detached from our other senses , they are part of us and part of our soul . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 30 · Location 435 We have roots in life , everything is related to our childhood or families and neighbors . ## Jonas Mekas at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 37 · Location 539 So that I ended up with my own artificial, concocted , subjective reality there , but not with an objective wedding, or an objective New York , etc . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 37 · Location 541 It’s just another concocted , fantasy reality that corresponds to whatever needs you have , and it’s as personal as mine . It’s neither present nor future . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 · Location 566 The question of meaninglessness is not that simple . For instance , from the student films that I have seen during my stay here , those films became sort of interesting to me when the obvious meaning disappeared . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 · Location 571 Because , let’s face it : we know that there is nothing , absolutely nothing without a meaning , and everything affects everything else . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 · Location 572 those rhythms of that film that seemingly has no meaning — in truth these films have their own meanings there . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 39 · Location 573 They are never literal , or too literal , they are on other levels . There are meanings or impacts in them that affect us . So that there it becomes interesting . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 40 · Location 581 You maybe are escaping some obvious realities , which we recognize as realities , the popular realities , the obvious ideas and meanings , but you cannot escape those that are already here but are not that obvious and not that clear yet , but some of us , like Stan , reflects them anyway , and those meanings are not Stan’s meanings , and meanings of my movies are not exactly my meanings : because we are not an island , Stan is not an island , we are connected with everybody very deeply and no man is an island . Like all of you , like everybody . There it is : how can you escape reality ? ## Jonas Mekas at Findlay College ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 44 · Location 644 The language of fiction , of narrative film is bent towards presenting the story and the protagonists who enact the stories . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 · Location 650 There is much talk about the underground filmmakers , about the underground cinema . You get all kinds of distorted impressions from the press , what’s all about . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 45 · Location 659 What the avant - garde filmmaker has done , he has developed the language , the vocabulary , the syntax , the forms , the approaches , the technology , the techniques of the nonnarrative film . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 54 · Location 809 diaries , it’s always an immediate reaction to the actual situation around me . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 57 · Location 851 I had twenty hours of film , before I began editing this version . ## Jonas Mekas Answers Questions after the Screening of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 79 · Location 1213 Reminiscences falls into the form of a notebook , or a diary , a form into which most of my later work seems to fall . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 80 · Location 1235 the idea of a diary imply stylization ? ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 80 · Location 1237 Of course , it soon became clear that when you write a diary , for example , you sit down , in the evening , by yourself , and you reflect upon your day , you look back . It’s a reflective process . But in the filming , in keeping a notebook with the camera , the main challenge became how to capture it , how to react with the camera right now , as it’s happening ; ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 81 · Location 1248 At the same time I realized something else . At first I thought that there was a basic difference between the written diary which one writes in the evening , and which is a reflective process , and the filmed diary . In my film diary I thought I was doing something different : I was capturing life , bits of it , as it happens , I was reacting to it with my camera as it happened . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 81 · Location 1251 when I am filming , I am also reflecting . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 81 · Location 1252 I do not have much control over reality at all , and everything is determined by my memory , my past . So that this “ direct ” filming becomes also a reflection , or a mode of reflection . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 82 · Location 1265 So it’s at that time that I began to understand that what was missing from my footage was myself : my attitude , my thoughts , my feelings the moment I was looking at the reality that I was filming . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 82 · Location 1269 how my Self is seeing it . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 82 · Location 1269 to merge Reality and Self , ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 83 · Location 1280 I couldn’t work in Lithuania in single frames . There were feelings , states , faces that I couldn’t treat too abstractly . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 86 · Location 1337 “ the time in Lithuania remained suspended for me , for twenty - five years , and now it’s beginning to move again . ” ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 87 · Location 1360 JM : I felt that to simply string the footage together would make it too heavy . I wanted to break it up . Squares and numbers act as structural devices . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 88 · Location 1371 One is the poetic attitude aspects ; and then there is another thing : the result , the thing produced by putting those attitudes or those feelings into a certain form . The first one , that is , the poetic attitude , you find it not only in poems , but in everything , not only in art . > "얼마 전 발레리 전집 을 읽다가 페이지를 펼쳤는데 시에 대한 짧은 담론이 있었어요. 그는 시에는 두 가지 측면이 있다고 말합니다. 하나는 시적 태도 측면이고, 다른 하나는 그 태도나 감정을 어떤 형태로 만들어낸 결과물, 즉 결과물입니다. 첫 번째, 즉 시적 태도는 시뿐만 아니라 모든 것, 예술뿐만 아니라 모든 것에서 찾을 수 있습니다. 그러나 두 번째 경우에는 우리가 시라고 부르는 특정 정의 된 형식을 다루고 문학에서만 찾을 수 있으며 역사가 있으며 다양한 종류의 시가 있습니다. 즉, 시적 느낌을 시 또는 시조와 혼동해서는 안됩니다. 시적 느낌은 조각, 회화, 영화 또는 삶 자체에서 찾을 수 있습니다. 따라서 우리는 시와 영화에 대해 이야기할 때 이 점을 염두에 두어야 합니다." > > “JM: I was reading, just the other day, looking through The Collected Works of Valéry , and I opened the page, and there it was, a short discourse on poetry. And he says, there are two aspects to poetry. One is the poetic attitude aspects; and then there is another thing: the result, the thing produced by putting those attitudes or those feelings into a certain form. The first one, that is, the poetic attitude, you find it not only in poems, but in everything, not only in art. But in the second case, we deal with certain defined forms which we call poems, and that we find only in literature, and it has a history, and there are different varieties of poems, etc., etc. > > In other words, we shouldn’t confuse the poetic feeling with the poem or poetry. The poetic feeling can be found in sculpture, painting, cinema, or life itself. So that we should keep this in mind when we speak about poetry and cinema.” (Mekas, 2020, p. 77) ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 88 · Location 1373 the second case , we deal with certain defined forms which we call poems , and that we find only in literature , and it has a history , and there are different varieties of poems , etc . , ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 88 · Location 1375 The poetic feeling can be found in sculpture , painting , cinema , or life itself . So that we should keep this in mind when we speak about poetry and cinema . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 93 · Location 1461 a displaced person . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 93 · Location 1461 The displaced person , the exile , as traveller . There is such a thing , and it’s not an abstract concept . A displaced person , a DP , is a reality of today . Because of the levels and complexities of the present - day civilizations , we have a displaced person . And I happened to be one . And a displaced person is not identical with Goethe’s Wilhelm . A displaced person cannot choose , hasn’t chosen to leave the home . A displaced person has been thrown out into the world , into the travel , forced into it . Q : [ about sadness of Reminiscences ] ## Jonas Mekas Interview ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 97 · Location 1528 They take the same kind of stance as a Stalinist social realist attacking Picasso , or the Nazis attacking the German Expressionist artists . They say things like “ your camera shakes , ” or “ you don’t know what you are doing , ” or “ you’re sloppy , ” or “ any child could do it . ” They’re not really carrying on a serious discussion . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 98 · Location 1541 Post - editing on the table is more a matter of eliminating what didn’t work . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 98 · Location 1546 Nonnarrative forms require a much more personal , intuitive and automatic kind of editing , and this can be done only during the shooting . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 · Location 1550 Antonioni , Hitchcock , Rossellini . So , there is always that kind of structuring during the shooting . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 99 · Location 1564 Cinema has been going into various directions in the last fifteen or twenty years . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 101 · Location 1599 it . Explanations and analyses begin when the work goes to the people . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 102 · Location 1600 Again , I am speaking not about cinema in general but about the avant - garde film specifically . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 103 · Location 1630 The only distinction I can accept is nonnarrative and narrative . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 104 · Location 1637 Then , all of the critic’s background comes into play : that is , all of the aspects of cinema come into play : the history of cinema , the theory of cinema , the techniques of cinema , the forms of cinema , the contemporary examples of cinematic works , the individual creators . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 104 · Location 1644 I agree . An evaluation of a particular film is based upon the critic’s intimate and extensive knowledge of all the aspects of cinematic art as well as his unique tastes and predilections . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 105 · Location 1651 The next stage after passion is analysis . You have to discuss the film on [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] grounds , on social grounds , on technical grounds , on historical grounds ; you have to place the film in a proper perspective and explain yourself . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 106 · Location 1678 GB : Can you conceive of a good director seriously setting out to cinematically reproduce a great literary work ? JM : Eisenstein considered filming Joyce’s Ulysses . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 107 · Location 1692 GB : One reason I asked you about your feelings on the subject is that when you describe your editing practices you sometimes use literary analogies . ## “Fragments of Paradise …”: A Conversation with Jonas Mekas ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 219 · Location 3580 Is the avantgarde the result of a kind of shattered culture , fragmented ? People like Adorno talking about the culture industry , kind of dividing everyone up into different groups and segments — is the avant - garde the result of this kind of [[aesthetics|aesthetic]] elite that’s keeping alive some kind of sensibility ? ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 221 · Location 3609 The technology determines the content and the form . It’s very difficult to determine what came first . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 222 · Location 3615 No . This is one of my heretical statements : the avant - garde , experimental film , has nothing to do with experimentation , absolutely nothing to do with it . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 222 · Location 3621 There is no experimentation , there is only execution . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 224 · Location 3652 says “ A magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman . The painter maintains in his work an actual distance from reality , a camera penetrates deeply into its web . ” ## Keep Dancing, Keep Singing ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 237 · Location 3857 To me cinema is cinema . Cinema is one big tree with many branches . The same as literature . ## Remains of the Day ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 241 · Location 3924 real . I don’t think of myself as working with memory but with real recordings of moments in the past , with whatever we have left . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 242 · Location 3924 don’t think of myself as working with memory but with real recordings of moments in the past , with whatever we have left . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 243 · Location 3949 I think that too much in contemporary art — too much time , too many exhibitions , too much space — is dedicated to horrors , to the darkness of our civilization . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 245 · Location 3975 Were you surprised when film and video moved massively into gallery and museum spaces from the 1970s into the 1990s ? JM : No , I wasn’t surprised . I thought it was natural . It was hard work to convince some galleries and museums to embrace film , but not all of them . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 245 · Location 3980 It was much easier to present a video on a monitor than to project a film , which requires a projector and someone who knows how to operate it . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 245 · Location 3988 So much of the contemporary art making I see around me — it’s all an artificial , invented reality , with artists trying to be “ creative . ” I’m very old - fashioned in that sense . I am interested in living things , like an anthropologist who is going with a tape recorder and recording old songs that humans , somewhere , are still singing or dancing to . I’m interested in catching these moments of contemporary humanity , recording it . I don’t need to create it . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 247 · Location 4011 We call it “ art history ” as if this history is complete , but in fact very little is left . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 247 · Location 4021 Motion - picture film is disappearing purely for profit - driven reasons . ## I Am Still a Farmer: A Discussion with Jonas Mekas ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 255 · Location 4140 Manuel De Landa talks about a thousand years of nonlinearity . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 255 · Location 4142 theoretically . Time does not exist to me , and memory does not exist to me either , because all the materials that are in my house , all the books , what’s written in them , all the documentation , all the junk that I have , and all the video cassettes and film reels , they are all materials , they are not memories to me , they are working materials , and I work with them . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 256 · Location 4154 > [[Henri Matisse|Matisse]] once said that one who wants to be an artist , the first thing he has to do is to cut out his tongue ? > > 마티스는 예술가가 되고 싶은 사람이 가장 먼저 해야 할 일은 혀를 잘라내는 것이라고 말한 적이 있습니다. ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 256 · Location 4158 For me it started when I read the interview with Francis Bacon and David Sylvester , and it was such an amazing document which somehow got me into art . ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 259 · Location 4205 You once said that a haiku is what comes closest to reality . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 259 · Location 4206 the condensation of reality — place , time of the day , the weather , and your thoughts , feelings at that moment . ### Note - Page 259 · Location 4206 What is the difference in between condenstion and essence? ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 259 · Location 4212 best . It’s about how to put in words , or on canvas , or on film the essence of that moment , ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 262 · Location 4255 Peter Fischli said that with his students and the younger generation of artists , we can observe a return to an almost Fluxus type of spirit , because Fluxus made art out of nothing . ## Jonas Mekas ### Highlight (yellow) - Page 271 · Location 4406 But forced uprootedness is not the same as when you leave home on your own , seeking luck or adventure abroad . An adventurer can always return home ; an exile cannot . ### Highlight (pink) - Page 277 · Location 4515 JM : I’m not so sure my work is about memories . My films are the celebration of reality , of life , of my friends , of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow . We don’t pay attention to it when it happens . Later , of course , we look back , we remember . But , for me , to catch , to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens — that’s what is , that’s what I’m possessed by . ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@mekas_jonas_2020]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```