Jonas Mekas

You might know that it’s not a show about me; it is an exhibition about the magazine Film Culture, not about me.

The creation of Film Culture magazine had nothing to do with ‘the society’. I was not interested in the society; I was only interested in cinema. France had Cahiers du Cinéma, England had Sight & Sound; these were very important film magazines and the United States had nothing. There was a need for a film magazine in the country and that was the reason why we decided to create Film Culture, a platform where we could discuss cinema, argue about cinema, write about cinema, see cinema, get excited about cinema; cinema, cinema, cinema. Forget the society!

Well, the ‘society’ likes watching films. And most of the films are made for the society, but that is another matter. Film Culture was about cinema, and people also like to read about films, they get interested, excited and they go to see the movie. So indirectly, the society, of course, is involved. But Adolfas and I worked at the magazine because of our love for cinema.

That is something else…

Pasolini was very, very, deeply involved in cinema; all these people that you are mentioning were as well. We shared a lot in this group of people, so we had no choice but to meet and work together. At that moment, I was zero; I was nobody. It was the magazine, the excitement about cinema, as already said, that brought us together. We were all interested in the same subjects, so it was not about personalities. Personalities or celebrities were outside our thing. Cinema was absolutely the centre. First, see the movies; after, talk about them; and then, write. In that order. And, of course, after all of that, make films.

It was very easy, it was normal, there was no effort needed. It comes together naturally; it is one thing.

Well, for me, publishing, writing and making movies is normal. Of course, there are others only interested in making films, even obsessed with making films. Others are obsessed with writing and, yes, I am obsessed in multiple ways. And indeed, Pasolini, as you mention, wrote poetry, novels, published articles as a journalist, and then he also made films. He was an activist in many different fronts as well.

Absolutely.

Oh, no. When you live wild, you live now, this moment, there is no place for history when you live your present time. Obviously, I did not think about making history. You have to do what you have to do and you are doing it. History… Time goes and, then, at some point, you look back. But when you do something, you are doing it now, concentrating at this moment.

Well, why one does certain things is not always that clear. Love, passion, who cares! You just have to do it, you have no choice; it is your life. And in my case, mostly I did it together with friends; you do it for yourself and for your friends, in community.

Cinema is one of the engines of my life, yes.

As I said before, I do many things simultaneously. In 1970, I got involved in the creation of Anthology Film Archives, a museum for cinema. I got so involved that I did not have enough time for the magazine. I had no choice but to stop it. For the last issue, number eighty, I was planning to do an issue devoted to Barbara Rubin: filmmaker, activist, etc. but I could not find the time to do it. So now, for this special occasion in Berlin, it was decided that this issue should come out as it was planned at the time, the 80th issue of Film Culture with the material I had collected back in 1995-96 plus many new materials. That is how this issue became a reality.
About the role of women, well, not only women, but also various minorities and alternative groups they all began coming into play with video. It became much easier and cheaper to make movies and to distribute them. It was not so masculine anymore. You know, you needed ‘certain’ energy – the macho energy – to become a director in Hollywood. With video, it was much easier for anybody who wanted to make movies and that helped women to go into cinema. In the beginning of the ‘70s, we had this emergence of women filmmakers. Until then, you had to be very strong, only a few women succeeded, for example, Leni Riefenstahl or Shirley Clarke – she was a very strong person. You had to be a very strong woman to go into the film industry and not to be destroyed.

Nowadays, I think there are quite a lot, and especially in some less commercially known categories, like for instance documentary and poetic avant-garde cinema. Still, not so many in the narrative. Still, strong personality is needed to work with large teams as professionals. But in the documentary field area – I do not know the statistics –, I think maybe there are as many women as men, or even more. In certain more personal forms of cinema, there are more women. Specially today, there is not only Hollywood or Cinecittà: you have gay and lesbian cinema, you have Asian-American cinema, black cinema, native American cinema, etc.
Nowadays, I think there are quite a lot, and especially in some less commercially known categories, like for instance documentary and poetic avant-garde cinema. Still, not so many in the narrative. Still, strong personality is needed to work with large teams as professionals. But in the documentary field area – I do not know the statistics –, I think maybe there are as many women as men, or even more. In certain more personal forms of cinema, there are more women. Specially today, there is not only Hollywood or Cinecittà: you have gay and lesbian cinema, you have Asian-American cinema, black cinema, native American cinema, etc.

Oh, yes, the digital and video are so much easier and, of course, some of the women who made films in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s could not show their films. It was not so easy to disseminate, to reach the audience. Today, with video and digital cinema, you can reach a lot of people. It is much easier through festivals and also via Internet, and that also helps the local cinema initiatives.

No, I had no radio, no telephone, and no electricity when I was a child. I grew up in a farming village in Lithuania, far from the city. I was between sixteen and seventeen when I heard the radio for the first time in my life. That was not my culture. During the war, during the Soviet and German occupations, if you had listened to the radio you would have been arrested. I was twenty-seven when I arrived in New York and that is when I began to live. Any case, I saw my first film when I was sixteen and it took another year until I saw my second one.
With the Internet now, the whole world is like one big city, but somehow, every city has little villages inside. Within this big society everything is uniform – everybody reads the same, eats, dresses, buys the same things. But there are always those that, you know… there are no differences between the ‘50s, the ‘60s and now. There are always small groups in the big city; they are very independent, very personal. There are little tiny minorities within the minorities. They know each other very well, who is doing what.
Do not worry about these big conglomerates that dominate culture and media, today they are here, but tomorrow they will be gone, this huge mass of nothingness. The little small minorities sometimes could kill the big monsters. Endangered minorities and endangered animals have always existed; three thousand years ago, in the 13th century, any period. For instance, during the medieval age, there were small cells: jugglers, hustlers, storytellers and poets, troubadours always existed; nobody took them seriously, and nobody takes us – the minorities – seriously. I am part of the small, small minority. They do not take us seriously and we do not care. Because we are here to celebrate creation, we are not here to become businessmen, not to destroy the planet. We are invisible but we are essential for what it means to be human.

But I must say I need money too (laughs), as I am building a library of cinema and I need to raise twelve million dollars. I am adding another floor on top of Anthology Film Archives building at 32 Second Avenue in Manhattan (New York) for the paper materials, documentation, audio and so on. We have a lot of material from a hundred years of history of cinema. That is why I need money. Send me money!

I must say that with the correct temperature and humidity control conditions, the specialist working in the Anthology Film Archives found out that film could last, at least, five or six hundred years. We have huge film archives and we know almost everything about the technical aspect, what it needs to be done. We are trying to preserve what we have, which is close to fifty thousand films; for that reason, the checks on temperature and humidity are very strict.
The digital support lasts from ten to twenty years, then technology changes and you have to retransfer them again to another support. Cinema and films are like art in general: if you want to see truly originals you go to Florence, to Madrid. So we have books and we have reproductions of these books, video and digital copies of films are like those book reproductions. Eventually, you have to see the original. You have to see the film as the film; of course, if you have something done on video, you have to see it as video. These are the basics.

Yes, exactly. Some of the books are very well produced, the colours are very well done but still, they are not like the pigments, which radiate. The same when you see a film and colours reflect from the screen and reach you; it is not the same as when you see it on a TV or on a computer screen. It does not radiate, and I am not even talking about nitrate film! One who has never seen the nitrate film of the ‘20s and ‘30s misses real glory of the black and white film. The nitrate film differs from the standard contemporary film as much as film differs from video. It is difficult to describe. It is more real and it has physicality, that is magic. Having said that, and going back to books, one can also be very inspired by a book of reproductions. Even by miserable black and white reproductions of the original colour works, I have been.