Photo of Jonas Mekas by Boris Lehman
Courtesy Jonas Mekas and the Maya Stendhal Gallery, New York
After an odyssey lasting almost five years as a forced labourer in Germany, and as a displaced person after the war, Jonas Mekas arrived in 1949 in New York. This marked the beginning of his new life, which from then on he has dedicated in numerous ways to film. His solo exhibition at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne showcases Mekas's wide-ranging influence, his sheer passion for film, his enduring influence on artists and film-makers of several generations, and on the very way film history is written.
The main emphasis of the exhibition is on Jonas Mekas's artistic and cinematic output, which is shown in a dedicated film programme and a number of installations. Since the 1960s Jonas Mekas has developed his own distinctive style which arose from his many years of documenting his daily life and passing events with a small hand-held Bolex camera. Mekas's short diary-like sequences have been pieced together combined with collages of original sound material, his memories and commentaries spoken from off camera. Since the early 1990s, he has taken this method, as exemplified in such films as 'Walden or As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty', and translated it into new media as 'frozen film stills', such as in 'To New York with Love', or video installations. Alongside his most recent work, Museum Ludwig is showing his large-scale '365 Day Project', for which Jonas Mekas filmed one video every day for a whole year.
Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New York. In 1955 he co-founded the journal Film Culture, from 1962 on he organised the Film-Makers' Co-operative, and likewise from 1964 on the Film-Makers' Cinematheque; since then he has curated film programmes showcasing avant-garde and underground films. Finally his commitment meant that at last the Anthology Film Archive, which he co-founded in 1970, could in 1985 be given a permanent home in a building acquired six years earlier, and thus has a permanent place as a film museum.
To watch Jonas Mekas's film about Andy Warhol and George Macunias click here.
Jonas Mekas
Until 1 March 2009
Museum Ludwig
Cologne
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