Jonas Mekas, the "godfather of American avant-garde film," has died at the age of 96. The Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, poet, and artist was a seminal figure on many fronts.
According to his
Washington Post obituary, "Mr. Mekas, who arrived in the United States in 1949 as a refugee, was weighted by the scars of wartime Europe and energized by postwar America. He was at the center of a historic era for the avant-garde. He published poetry and memoirs, made hundreds of films and videos, wrote an influential column for the
Village Voice and opened Anthology Film Archives, where future filmmaker Martin Scorsese was a frequent attendee in his youth.
Scorsese, John Waters and James Franco were among Mr. Mekas’s admirers, and although he never approached mainstream popularity, his friends and collaborators included some of the most important artists of his time and some of the most famous people in the world."
Those important people and famous artists included Jacqueline Kennedy, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, photographer-filmmaker Robert Frank, Peter Bogdanovich, and others. For more about Mekas, check out his superb website at
jonasmekas.com, as well as his
Wikipedia page, or the obits in the
New York Times and the
NPR (National Public Radio) website. Mekas was a man of many connections.
As mentioned, Mekas wrote an influential column for the
Village Voice. In fact, he was that publication's first film critic
. Mekas also co-founded the influential magazine
Film Culture, with his brother Adolfas Mekas. According to the obit in the
Guardian (UK), "The brothers founded one of the great American movie journals, the quarterly
Film Culture, in 1954 – at a time when mainstream culture did not think those two words belonged next to each other. The quarterly was a forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the emergent avant garde cinema that would convulse the art and movie worlds for three decades: the new American cinema, as Mekas dubbed it, or American underground film, as it is now more commonly known. In
Film Culture and his weekly column in the
Village Voice (1959-1981), Mekas for years banged the drum for other and minor, alternative and iconoclastic kinds of film-making: a cinema, as he called it, 'less perfect and more free'. His ecumenical approach to film culture, by no means characteristic of the wider, often schismatic avant garde for which he was the foremost impresario, was part of his saintly appeal: if you were making film-art that was personal and sincerely conceived, Mekas was on your side, come what may."
I don't think that they ever met, but Jonas Mekas did play a small role in the later day life of Louise Brooks. In that, other's noticed what Mekas noticed.
At a time when old movies and forgotten film stars didn't receive all that much press, Mekas name-checked Louise Brooks in his September 23, 1959 column in the
Village Voice -- noting the forthcoming showing of a Brooks' film at the Film Center at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA. [The film was
Prix de beaute (1930), which was making its American debut thirty years after it was first shown in Paris. Notably, among those in attendance were the poets Frank O'Hara and Bill Berkson, each of whom would write a poem inspired by Brooks.]
But wait, there's more.... At a time when Louise Brooks was little remembered, she appeared on the cover of the Fall 1965 issue of Mekas' magazine,
Film Culture.
Additionally, Mekas published an early article by Brooks,
"Charlie Chaplin Remembered," in the Spring 1966 issue of
Film Culture.
It was only her
second published piece in the United States, and it certainly helped
raise her profile among the film world's intelligentsia. In the years that followed,
Film Culture would publish other pieces by Brooks including "On Location with Billy Wellman" (Spring 1972) and "Marion Davies' Niece," (October 1974) and "Why I Will Never Write My Memoirs" (issue 67-68-69, 1979). In the latter issue, she is name-checked on the cover, alongside other significant figure like Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, and Blaise Cendrars (each of whom also figure to some degree in Brooks' life or legend.)
For more on the film, be sure and visit the Louise Brooks Society website page devoted to Pandora's Box.
