Portrait of Jonas, 1963

Transcription

1 Text & Interview by Aaron Rose / Portrait by Terry Richardson / images courtesy the artist SPECIAL THANKS TO BENN NORTHOVER Artists shouldn t waste a single drop of their lives fighting the old: we should continue and concentrate on the creation of the new, because the old will die by itself. Jonas Mekas (Diaries, 1972) It is only very infrequently in life that a person has the opportunity to sit down with an icon. I can count on one hand the number of times it has happened for me. For years and years, while I was living in New York, I would go see films at Anthology Film Archives. For those who have never heard of it, Anthology is a small theatre on the corner of Second Ave and Second Street in the East Village. However, during the time that I was frequenting the theatre I didn t really realize its history it was just one of those places I went because the movies were cool. Later on however, through a conversation with filmmaker Harmony Korine, I got more of the back story on the place and the man who founded it, Jonas Mekas. If this is your first introduction to Mekas, you re in for a real treat. Not only has he been involved in the underground film community for over 50 years, he has continued, even today, to place himself at the forefront of cinema culture. With someone like Jonas Mekas, it s almost impossible to know where to start. He is now 87 years old, which means that before I was even an embryo, he had already changed the cultural landscape of our times. That said, it is impossible to list all of Mekas accomplisments in one magazine article, so here is a brief history In 1944, Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, were taken by the Nazis and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. After the War, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S., settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two weeks after his arrival, Mekas borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16-mm camera and began to record moments of his life. Around the same time he discovered avantgarde film at venues such as Amos Vogel s pioneering Cinema 16, and in 1953 began organizing his own screenings of films by underground filmmakers. He has since become one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the New American Cinema, as he dubbed it in the late 1950s. In 1954, he became editor in chief of Film Culture magazine, a self-published film journal that he started with his brother. In 1958 he began writing his now infamous Movie Journal column for the Village Voice. At the beginning of the 1960s, the New York film underground was coming into full flower and in 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers Cooperative, which organized many legendary screenings of the time. In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for screening Jack Smith s controversial film, Flaming Creatures. He launched a campaign against the censorship board, which convinced him of the importance of an outlet for independent film more responsive to the filmmakers themselves. To serve this need, he opened the Filmmakers Cinematheque, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives. Anthology is now one of the world s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. As a filmmaker, his own output ranges from narrative films like Guns of the Trees (1961) to experimental essays (The Brig, 1963) to diaries such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (1972); Zefiro Torna (1992); and As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001). His films have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. In 2007, Mekas was honored at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association s award ceremony for his significant contribution to American film culture. That same year, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius, Lithuania. Exhibitions there focus on art and film collections by Mekas and his friend and artistic collaborator George Maciunas, founder of the Fluxus art movement. The Center houses an extensive avant-garde film archive and library, and has plans to build a Fluxus Research Institute. Most recently, his work was featured at the 51st Venice Biennial and was the focus of a major retrospective PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center in New York. An exhibition of his work will open at the Serpentine Gallery, London in and that s just part of the story. Through his various creative ventures throughout the years Jonas Mekas has been intimately involved with the careers of filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Frank and Andy Warhol. He hosted some of the first New York performances by the Velvet Underground and has been personal friends with cultural icons such as John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Salvador Dali, Allen Ginsberg, Jackie Onassis and many, many more. Unfortunately, to go into any more depth here would be almost impossible. There is, however, a book about his life, To Free The Cinema (Princeton University Press), that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to look deeper. Hopefully now you understand why it was so exciting (an such an honor!) for me to sit down with him. The following interview was conducted over lunch at a small French bistro, just around the corner from Anthology Film Archives in the East Village. Over a bottle of red wine and much laughter, Mekas reflected on his life, his art, the future of film and his motivations for spearheading so many incredible creative ventures. To bring it all fullcircle, the preceding evening we had both attended the New York premiere of Harmony Korine s new film Trash Humpers, perhaps one of the most amazing experimental features to be released in years. The future of film looked very bright to us that day. Portrait of Jonas, 1963 RVCA/ANPQUARTERLY 54 RVCAANPQ.COM 55

2 Aaron Rose: Your biography states that you moved to New York in Jonas Mekas: Not exactly moved. I was moved!! I came as a displaced person after almost five years of living in displaced persons camps in postwar Europe. I was brought here as part of the United Nations Refugee Organization on an army ship together with 3,000 others. This was after the second World War. When they brought the refugees to America they had places for living prepared for us, and jobs. I was actually supposed to go to Chicago not to New York actually. My original destination was Chicago. AR: So you arrived in New York, but then you went to Chicago? JM: I arrived in New York with my brother. We stepped out of the ship and we looked at New York and we said to each other, We are in New York! It would be stupid to go to Chicago! So we never went to Chicago. We stayed here. AR: Was that illegal? JM: No! No! If you could survive you could stay. There in Chicago, they had arranged a job for us in a bakery, you know, guaranteed. But here we had nothing. We had to find a job. But we took that chance and we fell in love with New York. I consider that New York saved my sanity. AR: Can you describe your feelings about the city when you arrived here? JM: We stepped out that evening into Times Square. We looked around and we did not know what was real and what was unreal. We thought we saw the moon, but we were not sure if it was the real moon. It was like a huge opera set. It was incredible! It was incredible. AR: Where exactly did you arrive from when you came to New York? JM: From Germany it was postwar Germany. AR: Oh so it was a totally different experience!! JM: You could not even compare it! It was like a fairy tale. After a whole decade of war and then postwar misery AR: Were you and your brother already making films at the time? JM: No. We were interested. I was interested, but you know I could only write, make notes, read about it. There was no money in the displaced persons camps. We were fed by refugee organizations. AR: What inspired you to pick up a camera? JM: Seeing films!! It was contagious. The same as writing poetry or music it s always the music that inspires you to be a musician. The same goes here seeing films. Most of the time, the films we were seeing in postwar Europe were bad. They were brought over to entertain the army. What we discovered here in New York at the Museum of Modern Art like the classics of the cinema from the twenties, thirties and the avant garde. You could not see any of that there! I mean, the closest to something that one could say was interesting was John Huston s Treasure of Sierra Madre. That was the first time I remember thinking, Hey! Look! Maybe something can be done in cinema. AR: Just out of curiousity. How did two brothers two displaced refugees from Europe find the Museum of Modern Art? JM: The New York Times! AR: Really?!! JM: Yes. We bought the newspaper and we discovered that they were screening the next evening at a place called The New York Film Society, which was run by a man named Rudolf Arnheim, who was a very well known art historian, and also by the great film buff Herman Weinberg. The program for that evening was a double bill. It was Jean Epstein s The Fall of the House of Usher, one of the great avant garde classics, and also playing was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. They used to screen films, I think it was on 18 th Street between 6 th and 7 th avenues. So that was what we saw! Then, after that, for the next three years or so, we did not miss a single film screening at MoMA, we did not miss a single theatre opening, any film opening, ballet, music Jonas mother, from Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania, , color film stills; To New York With Love, 2001, Color Film Stills Walden, 1969, black and white film stills AR: It s almost as if you guys were addicted JM: No! We were dry sponges! We were dry sponges because there was nothing in postwar Europe. There was nothing under the Soviet occupation and the German occupation where we grew up. There was nothing! It was forbidden, even. It was forbidden to read the French literature it was forbidden! So we came here like dry sponges and we sucked everything into ourselves. That would be the closest comparison to ourselves. We were sponges. Indiscriminately almost. You know, you don t know. You take everything in garbage and everything. AR: Yeah, like you just had to see it! See it! See It! JM: Yes. AR: What were you doing for work at that time? JM: We were not choosy. We took whatever job there was. Jobs were available very easily. My first job was at the Castro bed factory in Queens making beds. We had no real specialty no special talents. AR: When did you first pick up a camera? JM: About two weeks later. We borrowed some money from a family that lived in the same displaced persons camp as us in Kassel, Germany. We were very friendly. They had come before us and they already had jobs and had made some money. So we borrowed some money and we put a deposit on our forst Bolex camera. This was about two weeks after we came to New York. That was the beginning of my diary. AR: Were you actually trying to make movies at that time or was this more about just taking snapshots of your new life? JM: No! No! We had already written several scripts. We were practicing with our Bolex, just trying to master it. We had scripts for narrative films, and for documentaries. The first film that we wanted to do was a poetic documentary about what it feels like to be a displaced person. Later, some of that footage was used in my film, Lost, Lost, Lost. AR: Wow! So you held on to all that footage? JM: I still have it. Though I ve now used up four Bolexes. Actualy, really, five of them. One Bolex lasts seven years or something. AR: Did you process your own film? JM: No! We could not process our film. We had no money to build a lab. We were just walking around with our army jackets! We did not even have money to buy new clothes. AR: and this was the 1950s? JM: Yes. We arrived in New York on October 30, In three weeks from now we will be celebrating our 60 th year in New York. AR: What kinds of films were you watching in the 1950s? Who were your favorite filmmakers/films? JM: We went to all of them! Whatever was shown. AR: You didn t have favorites? JM: No. How could we have favorites if we weren t familiar with what there was? We had read the names like Orson Welles or Cocteau, but we had seen nothing! Two or three years later it was a different story, though, because we began publishing Film Culture magazine. AR: What inspired you to start a magazine? You didn t have magazine experience JM: I did have experience. When I was 12 years old and in primary school I was already mimeographing a little fourpage newspaper for the school. I was also editing it. Then, when I was 18, I became the technical editor of the local weekly newspaper. Then in the displaced persons camps I was the editor of the daily bulletin for the people in the camp. I was also publishing and editing a literary magazine. My life from childhood is in publishing and writing. AR: I had no idea! That makes perfect sense. JM: But that was not the reason why myself and my brother decided to publish Film Culture. The reason was that we had made friends already. Many friends that were running around with cameras that we were meeting at the screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and at Cinema 16. There were several places where young, film-interested people usually met. You would see them. I was not a student of The New School or NYU, but I used to sneak into the film classes where I met people who became some of the best known avant garde filmmakers. People like Gregory Markopoulos, Curtis Harrington, etc. In England there was a magazine, Sight and Sound, already. In France there was Cahiers du Cinema just beginning and there was another magazine called Cinema, and there was actually another one in England called Sequence. But here in New York there was RVCA/ANPQUARTERLY 56 RVCAANPQ.COM 57

3 nothing. We wanted to exchange. We wanted to discuss. We needed a platform so that we could begin to present and to discuss our ideas and exchange our ideas. There was nothing here. There was this miserable little publication called Films in Review, a very conservative monthly, and there was the Hollywood Film Quarterly that used to come out like once a year, but for us there was nothing. So it was emptiness and it was because of that emptiness that we decided that if nobody was doing it we had to. So we started to publish Film Culture. AR: Did you consider the European magazines to be part of the same family as you? JM: Not exactly. They were mostly devoted to the commercial cinema. Our friends were not in commercial cinema. We needed a magazine that would be open for both the commercial cinema and the new, independent filmmakers, the avant garde filmmakers because we ended up in the avant garde film and literary community. The Beat Generation was coming in. There was excitement. Very soon after there were the happenings theatre, the action painting, Abstract Expressionism everything was coming in! Coming in! There was like an electricity in the air! There was intensity and that was not in Sight and Sound. Not in Cahiers du Cinema. It was something else. So we felt that we needed a film magazine that was a little bit younger and in a different spirit. That s how Film Culture came to exist. AR: Did you consider yourself an artist at this point? JM: No and I don t consider myself an artist at this point now. AR: Really? I was wondering that because sometimes it is difficult to be both an artist and a critic. JM: No. I was still working in factories at that point and in 1953 I began to work in a photo studio. That s how I managed to pay for Film Culture. AR: So even though you were making films you didn t consider yourself a filmmaker? JM: No. I was just filming. I m doing the same thing now. Now I m just taping. I ve always done many things simultaneously. I worked whatever job I could get for money, I was organizing screenings. Already in 53 I was curating screenings at Gallery East, which was right here around the corner from where we are sitting now, on Avenue A and 1 st Street. AR: So you were curating underground screenings in the East Village in 1953? JM: Yes. Avant garde screenings. AR: You didn t waste any time!! JM: No. The difference when I say that I m just filming that I m not a filmmaker is this: You see, to make a film, those who make films filmmakers they have scripts and then they illustrate those scripts with actors, etc. and it s all controlled. You know what you are going after, the scene is described there. Even if it s a documentary in a cinéma vérité style, or like Michael Moore is doing now he knows what he is going after. He has an idea of what he s searching for and he finds it or he invents or whatever. I never know. I film real life. I have no script. I don t know what will come in the next moment. I don t know if I will film anything today or not. I always have my camera it is always with me and then suddenly I feel, This is it I have to film! I want to tape this. I want to have a record of this. I need it. It s some kind of an obsession. I never know what I m filming. It s unpredictable and I guess what I film is motivated by some memories. I don t know. I never know the reasons why I want to film this or that scene. AR: So it s just something you feel inside? There s never any thought about what you would like to make of the footage at all? JM: It s unpredictable. I mean, so much of what we do is determined by the first ten years of our life that you never know. Maybe in front of me at this moment there is maybe something, some detail that provokes some memory. Maybe some color or some movement that connects to somewhere with some movement or color or some detail that happened when I was maybe three years old? I feel it and I have to film. Something is touched by what s happening that has touched, jumped, connected with that moment or memory somewhere in the past and it makes me want to film. I don t resist those moments. I just follow it. AR: Did that take a long time to cultivate? JM: When I look back at my footage it s almost the same from the very beginning. Only at the beginning I was caught in a net of professional filmmaking. Rules like, Don t move your camera, stay there, stay there or like with light, You need lighting you should light it up or things like close-ups and long shots the whole vocabulary of the conventional cinema. The same thing happens with musicians. Like with jazz musicians, when one first learns to play, one has certain teachers one admires and it takes time to escape them and to find what s real for you. What you yourself are all about. You eventually free yourself from all the teachers, all the musicians or poets that you admire and you permit yourself to come out with that which is really unique and your Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol and Michel Auder, mid-1960s; Scenes from the life of Andy Warhol, /1991, color film stills; Andy Warhol at Invisible Cinema screening. Allen Ginsberg, from Walden, 1969, color film stills; Jackie Onasis, from This Side of Paradise, 1999, color film stills; Jonas Mekas & Salvador Dali, from Walden, 1969, color film stills RVCA/ANPQUARTERLY 58 RVCAANPQ.COM 59

4 own. It took me, I would say, to master my Bolex and to escape at least maybe ten years. AR: Going back to your early work as a critic. Did you have a particular approach to criticism? Did you have any role models? JM: No. Again, I had to invent myself. I can t remember who said it, but someone said, Oh Jonas is not really a film critic, he is a diarist. And that is right! Because I was not criticizing films. I was writing about only those films, reviewing only those films, in my columns which I liked. There were maybe only two or three times that I wrote about films that I did not like and I regret that I did that. I wrote only about the films that I liked. It was the same with Film Culture magazine we only wrote about those filmmakers that we admired and liked. AR: So it was possibly just another extension of your diaries? JM: Yes. Also, I was dealing with an area of journalism in motion pictures that was not touched by anybody else. They all wrote about public cinema or commercial cinema. With the exception of a few occasional articles, no one was writing about the avant garde or the experimental film, as it was called then. So there was nobody for me to follow. AR: In your opinion, what elements need to be included in a film for it to be considered avant garde? JM: There is no formula. No real description. One only has to go to the dictionary and look it up. The avant garde is always the front line in any field. In science, in music, where somebody just comes in, moving ahead into some totally unknown area, the future and doing something not so much that people aren t used to, but going maybe to different content, using different techniques, different technology. That s the avant garde area to me. That s where usually it s all very fragile, and on the front line is where usually most of the bullets hit you. Most of the attacks are directed against the front line. Against the avant garde. It s that area that I felt needed somebody who would defend it from all those critics and all those attacks. So that was my function, to try to help those very fragile new developments. AR: What were the attacks? Was it being discounted as garbage? JM: Every commercial writer or reviewer dismissed us as amateurs! They said we did not know what we were doing, that we were just babbling. They said our cameras were shaking, our images were shaking, there is no story or who cares about it this is amateur s work. That is continuing even today! AR: I know you were involved in early screenings of films like John Cassavetes Shadows and Robert Frank s Pull My Daisy. These films were released at the apex of the Beat Generation and were big media events at the time. Was this the first time that you saw what was considered underground filmmaking finally becoming mainstream? JM: Not mainstream but it became more visible. Mainstream maybe in certain New York or San Francisco circles, but on a very limited level. They did not play in 100 theatres or anything. Not even in ten theatres! It opened in New York and San Francisco, but usually those films were screened in film societies, university screenings, etc. I wouldn t call it mainstream. But still those films were easier to accept than say Stan Brakhage s Dog Star Man. AR: Do you think that was simply because the format of those particular films was more narrative-driven? JM: Yes. Both films were narratives. Semi-abstract narratives, but still narratives. There are protagonists, there was a loose kind of story line in both Shadows and Pull My Daisy. The people involved in them were also known Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, etc. They were not celebrities then, maybe now they are, but in 1958 they were not celebrities. Jack Kerouac had to die to become a celebrity and Allen Ginsberg managed to live long enough to eventually become a celebrity. They were respected though. Pull My Daisy was covered in Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono & John Lennon at Invisible Cinema screening; John &Yoko, from Happy Birthday to John, 1995, color film stills Filmmakers Cooperative Union Poster, Mid-1960s; Poster for The Brig, 1964; Jonas Mekas with Yoko Ono and John Lennon, June 9, 1971 Esquire magazine, a very positive review and that was mainly because of Jack Kerouac s narration. That write-up took it into a different category. It took it out of the avant garde. Also, Pauline Kael from the New York Times liked Kenneth Anger s Scorpio Rising very much that was another film that had made public inroads already. That was because there was something there thematically and also a loose narrative in that film. But that was about it until Andy Warhol came into the picture. AR: Many times when something belongs to a small core group of people and then becomes accepted, there is division within the ranks. Were there critics of this attention amongst the core filmmakers of the avant garde? JM: I think everybody painters, musicians, poets, filmmakers there was a community between 1955 and 1965 where everyone was helping each other. You could see everyone in the same places from downtown to midtown. The splits and fights came a little bit later. Some filmmakers clashed and some of them did not talk to each other for years, but those clashes came later. They came once some recognition came. It was not about money. Some filmmakers attacked Andy Warhol because his films were being discussed more than theirs. Even though most of the discussions of Andy s films were about how the writers did not like them. They would say, What is this? Is this a joke? This is not cinema! But nobody was writing about little avant garde films which were perfect and beautiful, because they were not controversial. There was a controversy in Andy s work, so he got a lot of press. AR: Warhol came into the underground film scene a bit late in the game, right? JM: The first films of avant garde persuasion that he saw, he saw at my screenings at 414 Park Avenue South between 28 th and 29 th streets. In January of 1962 it became the Filmmakers Cooperative headquarters. That s when the co-op was created and that s where I lived. As soon as the Filmmakers Co-Op was created, filmmakers used to come almost every evening and screen their films to each other. That s where Andy used to come and sit on the floor there were no chairs. That s where he met Jack Smith, and Taylor Meade, and a lot of other filmmakers, and saw their work. After that he decided to make his own films. AR: Were you involved with the Factory scene? Did you go there? JM: Occasionally yes. But I was too busy. I brought the Factory people into the Cinemateque because all of the early Warhol films were premiered at the Filmmakers Cinematheque that I was running. So they were always there. Sometimes, though, the first screening of one of Andy s films, after it was just made, would be at the Factory, so I would go there. AR: Many of your own films from the 1960s period include luminaries like Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Allen Ginsberg and basically a who s who of the art-intellectual scene in New York at the time. However, they are shot almost like home movies. As you were filming these people, was there a point when you said to yourself, I m a diarist. I m making diaries!! or were you sometimes thinking in terms of constructed narratives? JM: No. I never knew what I would do with that material. For example, for my film, Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol, I had the footage but I did not do anything with it until Andy was already dead. The Centre Pompidou in Paris were preparing his first retrospecive. They contacted me and asked if I had some footage of Andy that they could show at the same time. I said, Sure I have it! So that occasion gave me reason to collect some of the footage and that is how it was finished. Most of my films were finished that way. My last film, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, was made for a festival in Avignon, France. The theme of that festival was beauty, so they asked if I could make something for them. It was the same with Walden. That film originated in 1968 when the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo decided to have an arts festival representing music, theatre, poetry, and somebody suggested film. Somebody decided that the film component should be me. So they called me and asked if I could make something special for the occasion. I said, Of course! So that s how Walden originated. AR: How did Anthology Film Archives begin? What is its purpose? JM: The same like everything else! I ve never done anything unless there was a need for it. By 1968, there was already a large body of work what are now known as the American Avant Garde classics. A body of classics was by then already there. It was established! But, filmmakers very often are very careless about their materials. Some they keep the originals at home, or some they placed them with labs, which later, as in the case of Jack Smith, he took the original negative of Flaming Creatures to a lab and then forgot which lab! It was discovered much later. So there was a need to not only, okay, this is even more complicated. The body of work was there, but in 1960 maybe there were 15 universities that had film departments. Maya Deren was traveling around the country showing her films, but there were only like a dozen of these universities that she could go to. Around 1967, when the American Film Institute issued their first list of universities and colleges and high schools that had film departments the number had grown to like 1,200!! That s a huge jump in one decade. Almost all of these courses dealt with commercial film and the established history of cinema and classics. But, because there was also so much discussion of avant garde film in these courses, they also wanted to show some examples. They had seen nothing. So where did they go? Oh there is Jonas in New York! He runs the Cinemateque. So I used to get all those calls and I could not deal with them anymore. So I prepared a list that I would send to one, recommending this or that film, maybe some Brakhage but then I would say to myself, Which Brakhage? There are over 100 films of Brakhage maybe this one would be good? I did not want to be responsible for this all by myself. So the idea came about to create a little committee of filmmakers and film historians curators from the East Coast, West Coast, and Europe to make a film selection committee. We spent four years selecting. Looking and looking and arguing and discussing and we selected the beginning collection which contained 300 titles. That became the basis of Anthology Film Archives. We said, why don t we screen these? If anyone in any university wants to show something they can take any film from this list. AR: How did you work it out with the filmmakers? Was there a rental agreement in place? How did you finance all of this? JM: Yes actually we had an incredible sponsor. Jerome Hill was his name. He was a musician, a painter and a filmmaker. He won the academy award for a documentary he made about Albert Schweitzer. A beautiful little film. He was also a neighbor of Scott RVCA/ANPQUARTERLY 60 RVCAANPQ.COM 61

5 Fitzgerald. So he sponsored Anthology Film Archives to build a special theatre in the Public Shakespeare Theatre on Lafayette Street. It was a special theatre that was designed by [avant garde filmmaker] Peter Kubelka that was known as the Invisible Cinema, where if you are sitting in the seat in the theatre, you could only see the screen. You could not see your neighbor, you could not see the person in front of you or to the back. You were isolated completely with the film. Jerome Hill also sponsored the acquisition of the prints that we now have at Anthology. But, as we began, we wanted to find the best prints and with this we discovered that the originals of many of these films were fading, crumbling, collapsed. The filmmakers were not taking good care of them! Some did not even know where the originals were! So on one occasion, we tried to find the originals of a film by Adam Flaherty called The Man of Aran, and we chased it all over the world! His family did not know where it was. Then we discovered it was right here in New York on 57 th Street. So we had to go immediately into film preservation. Now, our film preservation program has preserved hundreds and hundreds of films. The American Film Preservation Society, run by Martin Scorsese, is very helpful also. AR: Do people propose films to you and then you decide what to preserve? JM: We have to decide and it is difficult. Because now, at Anthology, we have maybe about 60,000 titles. Most of our titles fall into the category of the independents, the avant gardes. When film labs began closing, switching to video, they abandoned film. We saved them, by dragging materials from film labs, sometimes from the dumpsters in the street. The money initially was totally unavailable for film preservation. As time went on, now more and more people are understanding that film is fragile and that film has to be protected and safe. So now more money is available, but still it is very limited. So let s say we have $10,000, that means we can preserve only maybe two or three little films with this. So we have to look at what are the priorities. What is really important to preserve? What is really crumbling and needs to be immediately protected? AR: It s almost like a celluloid emergency room JM: Yes. So decisions are made based on what is an emergency and what is important and what is less important at the time. We know we cannot preserve them all right now. AR: You would need a factory to do that. JM: Not necessarily a factory, but money. AR: Let s talk a bit more about your work JM: Well now I am working in video and installations and I m completely somewhere else. Not what we ve been discussing. That s my past. AR: How do you see the future of film? JM: Well I wouldn t call it the future of film. I would say the future of the motion picture because now it s not film. Also, now we have computers and other technologies. The future? Well, it will just continue! It s very, very active. It will continue into the future as everything else will continue. I mean technology is changing. You can make a movie now with your telephone. But we are still dealing with motion pictures. With the art and with the medium of motion pictures. No matter what they call it. Of couse technology determines the look or the visual texture. Like we say in painting the texture of watercolor is different from the texture of oils. So a different medium or a different technology produces a different kind of image. One kind of image is produced from 8mm film, a different kind of image by 16mm, one from 35mm and 70mm, etc., etc. What you can do with 8mm, you cannot do with 16mm. What you can do with 16mm, you cannot do with 70mm. And what you can do with your telephone, you cannot do with any of these! That also determines and influences the subject matter. The technology very much determines the subject matter and the style of what is produced. New technology allows us to go into completely different areas of daily life. We can go into any place. It s like the dream of Salvador Dali that eventually the camera will be in your head. AR: You are indeed the quintessential iconoclast. You have always championed the underdog. In all of your experience in all these years what have been the pros and cons of living life this way? John &Yoko Bed-In, from Happy Birthday to John, 1995, color film stills; Summer Manifesto, 2008, color film stills To New York With Love, 2001, Color Film Stills; Oona, from As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, 2000, color film stills; Jonas Mekas on 1st Avenue, photo by Benn Northover JM: I suppose indirectly what I do could fall into that category, but I m not a rebel by nature. I consider myself a farmer. Actually, once, Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote, Oh Jonas does everything with a farmer s shrewdness. So I m actually practical, down to earth. If something is not done and needs to be done, then I feel I should help it to happen. If the filmmakers are making films and they want people to see them or if the distributors refuse to take them because they think these are just some amateur works, then a distribution center is needed to be created. That s why Filmmakers Cooperative was created. It was from this necessity. Film Culture magazine was created from the same necessity. There was no other place to write or exchange ideas, so we needed a magazine. Then for screenings, that s why I started Filmmakers Cinemateque. There was no place for us to screen our films in New York. It s the same with Anthology! Nobody was preserving the films. We have to preserve them. Necessity! Necessity! Why do anything if there is no necessity? Or sometimes an inner necessity. You write or you compose or play or you sing because you must sing, you must play, you must write poetry, you must make films! There is an inner necessity. AR: So you were never trying to fight anything. You were just filling needs where you saw them? JM: No, never fighting. I just do what has to be done. I cannot see the work of my friends that I admire disappear. Or, if I see something that I like I want others to see it. I have to exchange! I cannot even look at the sunset by myself! I need friends! I do everything for friends for friendship. RVCA/ANPQUARTERLY 62