Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971 (Film and Culture Series)

In his Village Voice "Movie Journal" columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking's next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash. This new edition presents Mekas's original critiques in full, with additional material on the filmmakers, film studies scholars, and popular and avant-garde critics whom he inspired and transformed.

Arts & Photography

Mekas, Jonas

Photography & Video

Columbia University Press

In his Village Voice "Movie Journal" columns, Jonas Mekas captured the makings of an exciting movement in 1960s American filmmaking. Works by Andy Warhol, Gregory J. Markapoulos, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Robert Breer, and others echoed experiments already underway elsewhere, yet they belonged to a nascent tradition that only a true visionary could identify. Mekas incorporated the most essential characteristics of these films into a unique conception of American filmmaking's next phase. He simplified complex aesthetic strategies for unfamiliar audiences and appreciated the subversive genius of films that many dismissed as trash. This new edition presents Mekas's original critiques in full, with additional material on the filmmakers, film studies scholars, and popular and avant-garde critics whom he inspired and transformed.

Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971

Andy Warhol

Coplans, John

TOMKINS, Calvin

Little,Brown & Co

poetry, tr Vyt Bakaitis, foreword Czeslaw Milosz

There Is No Ithaca

Literature & Fiction

United States

Black Thistle Press

Poetry. Translated and edited by Vyt Bakaitis. The Brooklyn Rail is excited to present a two-part publication WORDS APART AND OTHERS / MESSAGE AHEAD, from Rail Editions, which celebrates the poetry and artistic legacy of pioneering filmmaker Jonas Mekas (b.1922 Semeniškiai, Lithuania). WORDS APART AND OTHERS is translated and edited by long-time translator and poet Vyt Bakaitis, who brings poems spanning three decades of Mekas's career (1967-1998) to English audiences for the first time. The book opens with a timely and discerning preface by poet Anne Waldman. "In his poems, Jonas Mekas, the legendary filmmaker and artist, takes a Dantean journey down through the circles that surround the self. And like Dante, instead of seeing horizontally from some fixed place to the horizon, Mekas sees vertically, but from the lit world into the depths of experience. Besides enacting a vertiginous examination of the meaning of a life, the striking verticality of his lines functions like an auger 'going / deeper, / deeper / in.'"--Forrest Gander "Just like his films, Jonas Mekas's poems hold his dignity, their pace unfolding as the poet looks down at mountains from a plane. Later he's a bit of an actor sitting on the shore, anticipating darkness, uses 'soul' as singular, remembers being little and those old friends and then it is day, bright yellow and he is beginning again. The colors here are true, the experience is so real. Mekas's poems are a plain joy to read, timely and refreshing like a perfect glass of water."--Eileen Myles

Words Apart and Others

Poetry

Rail Editions

Literary Nonfiction. The Brooklyn Rail is excited to present a two-part publication WORDS APART AND OTHERS / MESSAGE AHEAD, from Rail Editions, which celebrates the poetry and artistic legacy of pioneering filmmaker Jonas Mekas (b.1922 Semeniškiai, Lithuania). MESSAGE AHEAD is a devoted companion to the collection of poetry, WORDS APART AND OTHERS, and features twenty-one distinguished poets and critics, friends and admirers, reflecting on Mekas's pioneering contribution to contemporary art and culture, as the "godfather of the American avant-garde." "Jonas Mekas. Saying the name brings home a range of agitating mind sensations, mainly an accumulation of often challenging film experience from the last half-century. Practically a rubric for the whole phenomenon of radically new cinema, it's an experienced name, coming to us with compressed suggestion--that is, a name with its own poetics. If saying it now resonates for me in new ways without entirely losing the old ways, it's on account of having read his poetry."--George Quasha "Over his long lifetime, Jonas Mekas has adhered to a radical aesthetic of openness, and the poetry he has made into books and films posts clear-cut markers along the trail as his journey continues...The poet Jonas Mekas creates durable works, and fellow poets gather here to appraise, for clarity and currency, certain of the poems he has published."--Vyt Bakaitis "Oh Jonas, I walk the muddy roads with you, take stock of the brush by the wayside. Note the small blue flowers that pinch through the soil. The poems, like the rush of clouds overhead, are on the move. The sky turns pale then blue then indigo. The lamp is lit, then extinguished. The wind sighs against the eaves of the house, the trees croak in unison, your words are like stepping stones through an ancient river bed, where the waters swirl, then ebb, then fall away to a stony, dry, empty place that suddenly wells up with emotions, so simple, so basic, like bread, like milk, like wine."--Penny Arcade

Message Ahead

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This volume brings expert opinion and first-hand testimony to bear upon the events surrounding the creation and destruction of Andy Warhol's Thirteen Most Wanted Men at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The complex constellation of art, politics and gay life surrounding Warhol's mural and its painting-over comes alive in 13 interviews―with historian Hilary Ballon, critic Douglas Crimp, poet Diane di Prima, 1964 World's Fair head of television Albert Fisher, poet John Giorno, art historian Anthony Grudin, civil rights historian Felicia Kornbluh, former Warhol assistant and poet Gerard Malanga, filmmaker Jonas Mekas, art historian Richard Meyer, former Warhol assistant and photographer Billy Name, Rockefeller biographer Richard Norton Smith and architect and critic Mark Wigley. The interviews are introduced by the show's co-curator Larissa Harris, and accompanied by reproductions of all of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men; photographs of Warhol and the Fair by Factory regulars and photojournalists; and rarely seen archival documents from Warhol's Time Capsules.

13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World's Fair: Conversations

Giorno, John

Crimp, Douglas

Name, Billy

Meyer, Richard

Ballon, Hilary

Chambers, Nicholas

Elman, Dick

Finkelpearl, Tom

Fisher, Albert

Frye, Brian

Grudin, Anthony

Kornbluh, Felicia

Malanga, Gerard

Mennel, Timothy

Di Prima, Diane

Individual Artists

Queens Museum/The Andy Warhol museum

A Dance with Fred Astaire is an extraordinary collection of anecdotes and rare ephemera featuring a dizzying cast of cultural icons both underground and mainstream, both obscure and celebrated. Memories and diary entries, conversations and insights into his work sit alongside collages of beautifully reproduced postcards, newspaper cuttings, film negatives, lists, posters and photographs, envelopes and letters, book covers, telegrams, cartoons and doodles. Mekas has kept and archived the artifacts of his life as a cultural touchstone down to the minutiae, all of which is brought together here in the form of a unique and fascinating scrapbook of a life lived with the highest artistic commitment. Guided by Mekas’s distinctive prose and suffused with warmth, A Dance with Fred Astaire is rhapsodic, poetic and funny as all get out. A revealing visual autobiography of a genuine culture hero.

A Dance with Fred Astaire

Anthology Editions

Film critic and experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas has been a central figure in the New York avant-garde almost since arriving there from Lithuania soon after the end of World War II. He documented and was associated with the Fluxus movement, Warhol's Factory, and the Living Theater, and as the founder of the Filmmaker's Co-Op and Anthology Film Archives he has been a tireless and essential advocate of avant-garde film and performance. During all this time he has never been without his Bolex camera, which he has used to write a long, intimate film from which the photograms in Just Like a Shadow were extracted. As Mekas himself sees it: "The cinema is nothing but a photogram, one single photogram!" And indeed the cinematic quality of this collection is unmistakable. Journeying through Mekas' story, we encounter a great many of Mekas' fascinating friends, such as Andy Warhol, Nam June Paik, Robert Frank, the Kennedy family, Salvador Dali, Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Nico, Gerard Malanga, Allen Ginsberg, Henri Langlois, Stan Brakhage, Jack Kerouac, Lou Reed, Miles Davis, and many others, witnessing all those moments, happy or not, which he captured with his camera and his irreverent eye.

Jonas Mekas: Just Like A Shadow

Steidl

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