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

By Jonas Mekas and Peter Bogdanovich

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 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541589

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Introduction to the Second Edition

GREGORY SMULEWICZ-ZUCKER

On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, several friends and collaborators (myself included) were asked to write short appreciations of Jonas Mekas’s contributions to the arts. Mekas’s colleague, the film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney, struck upon the problem of assessing Mekas’s work in the brief space granted us: Mekas has played a variety of roles that evade easy summary.¹ He is a filmmaker, poet, film critic, curator, and the cofounder of a journal (Film Culture); a film distribution organization (the Film-Makers’ Cooperative); and a library, museum, and theater (Anthology Film Archives). Setting aside his status as one of Lithuania’s foremost poets,² Mekas is the single most important defender and promoter of the American avant-garde cinema movement, which gradually came into existence from the 1950s to the 1970s. This movement included filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Gregory Markopoulos, Marie Menken, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, as well as Mekas himself. Unfortunately, no one has yet undertaken the major task of producing a rigorous study covering the full scope of Mekas’s life and work. This would provide a much-needed critical assessment of his place as an artist and as a champion of the avant-garde in the United States.³ This volume and introduction, however, has a more circumscribed goal. The purpose of the volume is to make Mekas’s long out-of-print 1971 collection of his pieces as the film critic for the Village Voice—Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema—available to a new generation of film students, scholars, and lovers. The aim of this introduction is to suggest why it is important to continue reading Mekas’s column forty years after he stopped writing it.

Mekas’s column was by no means a venue for conventional film criticism. The reader will find that Mekas seldom adhered to the format for film criticism that appeared at the time of its publication. Indeed, it is unlike the film criticism that is prevalent in many of today’s newspapers, internet publications, or blogs. Mekas could write in the fashion of a disciplined critic, but his writing could also adopt a lyrical style. Such an approach was undoubtedly frustrating for a public that was and remains more comfortable with critics whose prescribed role is to say whether a film is good or bad. I will suggest that Mekas’s aim throughout his writing has been to compel his readers to think about and see films differently. For him, cinema is a vehicle for opening viewers to new forms of aesthetic experience. In my view, this is why Mekas reserved his scathing reviews for films that he felt reproduced mundane techniques or manipulatively played on sentiment, i.e., mainly those films produced by the studio system. At the same time, Mekas did not endorse novelty for its own sake. Then and now, his aesthetic sensibilities often enabled him to distinguish films that might serve to cultivate an expansion of aesthetic experience from those that were merely sensationalistic and cynical. As more and more artists search for techniques to garner public attention, Mekas’s appreciation for the emancipatory qualities of aesthetic experience proves to have been prescient.

The films Mekas wrote about in his column evade easy categorization. The filmmakers he chronicled are often too easily lumped together as members of an American experimental or avant-garde film movement because they are so unlike anything that appeared at the time that they were working or since. It is perhaps better to think of them as united by a common effort to move cinema beyond entrenched narrative and stylistic constraints and to explore the fullest possibilities of the cinematic medium. Partly for this reason, in place of more commonly used terms like experimental or avant-garde cinema, Mekas prefers to use the term poetic cinema to describe the movement he championed. Despite his focus on the American avant-garde, Mekas’s approach to cinema was planted in and disciplined by a tradition that included the works of D. W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Carl Dreyer, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jean Vigo. Like the filmmakers whose work Mekas promoted, these filmmakers, in his view, had utilized cinema to transform the way the world could be seen—even if it meant seeing it more uncomfortably. In this respect, Mekas could develop a pedigree, a tradition for a way of seeing cinema, in which the works of those filmmakers he championed could be inserted.

This tradition was formalized into a canon of representative works when Mekas, along with Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Ken Kelman, and James Broughton, formed the Anthology Film Archives Film Selection Committee to compile the essential cinema list. The list served as the basis for the collection of films at Anthology Film Archives.⁴ Though the list has not been updated, the concept that cinema has a canon that goes beyond lists of the ten or one hundred best films, and that there should be venues, like Anthology Film Archives, dedicated to that canon remains bold.⁵ While other venues for film as art still exist in New York, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Film Society at Lincoln Center, none established the promotion of a canon with, more or less, specific criteria for what would be included as part of their mission. The canon constructed by the selection committee connected cinema’s past to its future—the work of Georges Méliès to the work of Brakhage. As the committee’s manifesto put it, "Anthology Film Archives is philosophically oriented toward the pure film, and it takes its stand against the standards of contemporary film criticism. The curriculum it proposes constitutes a film history for a student and aspiring film-maker who wants to know the medium as an aesthetic endeavor."⁶ Part of Mekas’s work in his writings for the Voice was to defend such an understanding of film and explain its importance to the general public.

The reader will find another peculiarity in Mekas’s style as a film columnist. Over the course of his career at the Voice, and as he became a stronger proponent of what became known as the New American Cinema, Mekas’s writings took on a new kind of combative focus. Rather than fight against the mundane techniques of mainstream cinema, he used his column to fight for poetic cinema. He defended it against the tastes of his fellow film critics. But he also defended it against public tastes, battling against the censors who tried to prevent the screenings of films like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’Amour. Consequently, the reader of the following pages will find that Mekas’s columns could deviate from the subject of film itself and turn against a culture that Mekas felt resisted seeing film as art. It is important to recall that though several extremely important writings on film had appeared by the time Mekas began his column, a critical language for discussing film as art was still maturing. Filmmaking as business could overshadow such serious discussions. Moreover, with a few notable exceptions, the techniques for writing critically and theoretically about cinema still drew heavily from literary criticism. Even this approach could take on a vulgar form with prominent critics emphasizing plot structure above all else.

There is a final point that the reader should keep in mind while reading Mekas’s columns. To the extent that Mekas has an aesthetic theory, it is a very thinly developed one. It emphasizes the emancipatory prospects of aesthetic experience in helping us to see the world differently.⁷ This does not privilege the camera’s role in the manipulation of reality. Rather, what is important is that the camera has the potential to make us see the world anew and thus reflect on our experience and our humanity in new ways.⁸ But Mekas never explicitly makes this point. It is scattered throughout his writings and films. Mekas has no theoretical apparatus of the sort propounded by older film theorists like Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Siegfried Kracauer, or the French theorists who were gaining popularity in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, like André Bazin, Jean Mitry, or, later, Christian Metz. Mekas is no film theorist in the same sense as these other writers. But, as I will later argue, a profoundly humanistic aesthetic sensibility drives his writings. This can all too easily be missed amid his polemical writing style.

In section one, I offer an outline of Mekas’s biography. Mekas has published a memoir of his early years and conducted many interviews that deal with his personal and professional history.⁹ Therefore, the brief biography serves only to orient the reader as she goes through the text so she can better recognize names, organizations, controversies, and so on. In the following section, I place Mekas’s writing in their cultural context. I argue that Mekas was invested in debates about the meaning of culture while also acting as an insurgent against what he saw as staid understandings of culture. This is important for understanding why Mekas’s column was so unique. In this section, I also pay particular attention to the criticisms that Pauline Kael leveled against Mekas. In her lifetime and in the years after her death, Kael’s criticism has been widely celebrated. She has influenced a generation of influential film critics. Though her critical positions are far from hegemonic, in my view, the lasting and widespread success of Kael’s approach marks a deeply problematic turn away from the appreciation of film as art. For this reason, her views serve as a foil for better appreciating Mekas’s writings. In the final section, I offer my own argument for the ongoing relevance of Mekas’s views on cinema. Mekas’s approach and concerns offer an alternative, if not a corrective, to current trends in film criticism. There are still lessons to be learned from Mekas’s way of seeing cinema.

A Brief Biography

Jonas Mekas was born in Semeniskiai, Lithuania, on December 24, 1922. At the time of his birth, a vibrant intellectual life burgeoned in a newly independent Lithuania. Even as the son of a farmer growing up in a small village, Mekas had access to large libraries of important literary and philosophical works that had been translated into Lithuanian as well as Lithuanian newspapers and magazines provided by family members, friends, and neighbors. Following the end of World War I and the concomitant postwar debates over national self-determination, a sense of Lithuanian national culture began to flourish. Lithuania’s period of independence, which lasted from 1918 to 1940, coincided with Mekas’s childhood and youth. Lithuania’s brief period of independence ended when it was occupied by the Soviet Union and became a Soviet Socialist Republic in 1940. During World War II, control of Lithuania alternated between the Soviet and Nazi regimes. After the war, Lithuania was reoccupied by the Soviet Union and remained a part of the Soviet Eastern bloc until 1990.

While the Nazis and Soviets vied for power, Mekas joined an underground cell that distributed news from the BBC. Fearing for their safety, an uncle secured papers for Mekas and his brother Adolfas to travel to Vienna as students. It was en route to Vienna that Mekas began to keep a detailed diary. On July 19, 1944, eight days after beginning his journey to Vienna, Mekas wrote, I am neither a soldier nor a partisan. I am neither physically nor mentally fit for such a life. I am a poet.¹⁰ His work as a diarist would later shape his work as a filmmaker, leading him to create the diary films for which he has become so well known.¹¹ Before they could reach Vienna, the Mekas brothers were arrested by the Germans and transported to a forced labor camp at Elmshorn, Germany. In March 1945, eight months after their arrest, the brothers escaped the camp to try to reach Denmark. They spent the remainder of the war hiding on a farm near the Danish border. Thereafter, they lived in displaced persons camps. During that time, Mekas briefly studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. He also wrote prodigiously. Mekas’s poetry remains almost entirely unknown outside of Lithuania, but it was while living as a displaced person that he produced one of the seminal cycles of Lithuanian poetry, Idylls of Semeniskiai. Adolfas Mekas, who prepared the second translation of the work into English, noted that his brother freely experimented with Lithuanian grammar, combined regional dialects, and created neologisms. The book was first published in 1948 while the Mekas brothers were living in a displaced persons camp at Kassel.¹² Czesław Miłosz and John Ashbery have since praised it, but, more significantly, it acquired a revered status among Lithuanians living under communism.

On October 19, 1949, Mekas and his brother boarded a ship of war refugees for the United States. The brothers settled in Williamsburg, New York, where, two months after his arrival, Mekas purchased his first Bolex 16 mm film camera. A cinematic diary soon complemented his written diaries. Over the next few years, Mekas worked in factories. In his free time, Mekas immersed himself in the growing New York independent arts scene and, in particular, made frequent visits to cinemas across New York. He soon discovered the influential Cinema 16 film society, run by Amos and Marcia Vogel.¹³ Cinema 16 was a consistent venue for avant-garde cinema. For Vogel, the subversion of aesthetic, psychological, and political norms lay at the heart of cinematic expression. As he put it, Subversion in cinema starts when the theatre darkens and the screen lights up. For the cinema is a place of magic where psychological and environmental factors combine to create an openness to wonder and suggestion, an unlocking of the unconscious. It is a shrine at which modern rituals rooted in atavistic memories and subconscious desires are acted out in darkness and seclusion from the outer world.¹⁴ Mekas and Vogel would later part ways, but it is surely true that something of Vogel’s view of cinema as a form of rebellion resonated with Mekas’s own sensibilities. Moreover, Cinema 16 exposed Mekas to the kind of cinema that he would soon dedicate himself to championing in his writings. Mekas began to curate his own screenings of avant-garde works at Gallery East in the spring of 1953.

Mekas’s work as a film curator brought him into contact with a vibrant group of people writing on cinema and led him to found the journal Film Culture in 1955.¹⁵ Film Culture emerged because of a felt need for a serious American film magazine. Europe had a number of older, established publications, most notably Britain’s Sight & Sound (founded in 1932). In the United States, the journal Film Quarterly had initially been founded as Hollywood Quarterly in 1945 and in the 1950s was primarily focused on the mainstream. In turn, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures had founded its magazine, Films in Review in 1950. Yet, Film Culture was very different from such publications. It was the product of the new enthusiasm for the discussion of film as art and a climate of heated cultural debates and exciting innovations across the arts. It had its European counterpart in the French Cahiers du Cinéma, which had been founded four years earlier. From the outset, Film Culture was a unique and exciting publication. Its first issue, for example, opened with a short article by Orson Welles. During its first four years, Film Culture could boast articles by established theorists like Arnheim, Kracauaer, and Parker Tyler, who gravitated toward the publication. It was also an outlet for a younger generation of film critics, which included the future major critic Andrew Sarris as well as the filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich. But, in the beginning, its identity was somewhat nebulous. As one of its later contributors, P. Adams Sitney, has noted, "In its first state, Film Culture was a general intellectual review of film and, at times, television, with catholic interests in film history, theory, sociology, and economics. Since the editors believed in presenting an open dialogue on controversial issues, the magazine as a whole had no single polemical thrust."¹⁶ It did not have the same clear theoretical identity of a publication like Cahiers under the guidance of Bazin. Nevertheless, the founding of Film Culture marked an early indication of Mekas’s ambitious vision for cultivating new forums for the discussion and promotion of the understanding of film as an art form in the United States. Its identity would become more precise as it became a part of the broader constellation of organizations that Mekas would later take a leading role in establishing in support of avant-garde cinema.

Film Culture targeted and appealed mainly to an intellectual audience. Mekas would reach the broader public when, in 1958, he approached Jerry Tallmer, an editor at the Village Voice, to propose that the Voice establish a regular film column. On November 12, Mekas’s first Movie Journal column appeared. Shortly thereafter, Mekas launched his assault on the cinematic mainstream: Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films.¹⁷ He frequently used his column to write on American avant-garde cinema, providing the discussion of these films with a regular public platform. Following the responsibilities of his fellow critics at other publications, Mekas also wrote on mainstream cinema—a task he would later turn over to Andrew Sarris.¹⁸ Early on, Mekas began writing about the film-poem as a way to refer to avant-garde films.¹⁹ In so doing, he was picking up on a discourse on the relation between avant-garde cinema and poetry that was taking place among several writers and filmmakers involved with the avant-garde.

One of the most significant and developed discussions of the relation between avant-garde film and poetry took place at the Poetry and the Film symposium hosted by Cinema 16 in 1953, which included Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, and Parker Tyler as panelists.²⁰ Each of the panelists broached the topic differently and, at times, they seem to have talked past one another (particularly in the case of Deren and Thomas). Nonetheless, the event marked the exploration of a new idiom for speaking about avant-garde films in relation to other forms of cinema.²¹ During the panel, Tyler explicated the notion of a poetic cinema and related it to the work the American avant-garde:

Now, poetical expression falls rather automatically into two groups: that is, poetry as a visual medium and poetry as a verbal medium, or, in a larger sense, as auditory, and that would, of course, include music. We might well begin with some of the shorter films that concentrate on poetry as a visual medium, and this, of course, leads right to Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet, and to Buñuel-Dali’s Andalusian Dog, and to Watson’s Lot in Sodom. All of these are classics now, and they emphasized a surrealist poetry of the image and gave rise to schools and styles of avant-garde all over the world. Cinema 16 patrons are familiar with some of these outstanding works—those of Maya Deren, of James Broughton, of Kenneth Anger, of Curtis Harrington. All of these film-makers concentrated on what might be called pure cinema—entirely without words as a rule, although sometimes with music. Then to go back (after all, the avant-garde movement in poetry in America goes rather far back, at least to the 1920s) I know there was a type of film which got the name cine-poem, and these films were impressionistic, but they concentrated on pictorial conceptions of city life, of nature, and, importantly, they stressed abstract patterns.²²

Deren, in turn, spoke of her understanding of poetry, A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement.²³ It is likely that Mekas was introduced to the notion of poetic cinema through such discussions. The term film-poem provided Mekas with the beginnings of a vocabulary for talking about what had previously been called experimental cinema in a way that did not rely on seeking analogies with narrative film. The avant-garde was not something that merely stood in opposition to narrative film. It had its own language, and drawing the analogy with poetry helped to convey its distinctiveness of purpose.

Avant-garde cinema’s earliest advocates had struggled to find a way to write about these films. Indeed, one of the things that would separate Mekas from earlier advocates of the American avant-garde was his refusal to see avant-garde films as experiments. In 1949, Lewis Jacobs, the founder of the short-lived magazine Experimental Cinema, authored a survey essay on, what Jacobs called, experimental cinema in the United States. Above all, he emphasized the indebtedness of the American filmmakers whose work he reviewed to the surrealism of the French, the expressionism of the Germans, or the realism of the Soviets. Jacobs was, of course, correct about the influences, but his assessment of the films themselves remained vague: All are compelling in terms of their own standards and aims and each beats the drum for the experimenter’s right to self-expression.²⁴ Perhaps the filmmaker who most clearly saw the limitations that narrative form placed on filmic language was Maya Deren. In 1946, Deren succinctly framed the problem: What has been most responsible for the lack of development of the cinematic idiom is the emphatic literacy of our age. So accustomed are we to thinking in terms of the continuity-logic of the literary narrative that the narrative pattern has to completely dominate expression in spite of the fact that it is, basically, a visual form. Once we arrive at an independent film idiom, the present subservience of cinema to the literary story will appear unbelievably primitive.²⁵Just as Deren saw that cinema needed to break free from its dependency on narrative structure, Mekas understood that film criticism had to find a way to talk about these films without resorting to discussing a narrative or speaking vaguely about experimentation. By bringing the term film-poem to the audience of a newspaper with a rapidly growing circulation, Mekas helped an uninitiated public begin to grapple with the films he promoted. It provided readers with a conceptual referent when reading about films that could not be described with recourse to discussion of a plot or the quality of a performance.

Despite his advocacy of poetic cinema in the Voice in the late 1950s, Mekas had come into conflict with many of its leading figures just a few years earlier. In 1955, Mekas penned an article for Film Culture that outraged the avant-garde filmmakers whose work he would later vigorously defend. In The Experimental Film in America, Mekas wrote of the adolescent character and crudity of films by Brakhage, Anger, Markopoulos, Deren, and others.²⁶ In the years that followed, Mekas’s views would change dramatically. Reflecting on the article in 1970, Mekas explicitly rejected its argument, calling it a Saint-Augustine-before-the-conversion piece.²⁷

The dispute over the shift in Mekas’s attitude is linked to the divergent currents in independent cinema: between films with an improvisational style, but still-discernable narrative arc, and more avant-garde, shorter works. In the 1955 essay, he clearly favored the more professional and polished style of independent narrative films. The question of when Mekas abandoned that view is somewhat clouded and confused by the enthusiasm he expressed in his early writings for the Voice for feature length independent films, notably John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1959), Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959), and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961). At least a few scholars have taken Mekas’s support for such films in the late 1950s and early 1960s to mean that Mekas still held his 1955 views and that he only later came to appreciate the radical avant-garde.²⁸ According to Mekas, however, his reevaluation of Brakhage occurred much earlier, when he saw Brakhage’s 1957 show at the Living Theatre.²⁹ Further, his admiration for Deren is evidenced in his February 25, 1959 Voice piece, Maya Deren and the Film Poem.³⁰ For Mekas, it was not a question of choosing a side between the improvisational narrative cinema of Cassavetes, Frank and Leslie, and Clarke, and the poetic cinema of Brakhage and Deren. Mekas saw both currents as expressions of the emancipation of cinema from the constraints of strict structures and tired filmic devices.

When Mekas began writing for the Voice, the works of young French filmmakers affiliated with Cahiers du Cinéma were beginning to reach American audiences. The American avant-garde filmmakers, however, lacked the organization of the French members of the nouvelle vague.³¹ Mekas was among twenty-three filmmakers who met on September 28, 1960, to form an organization to distribute the work of the U.S. filmmakers. The meeting led to the founding of the New American Cinema Group. The founding of the group served to unify these filmmakers. It also marked a break with Vogel.³² Cinema 16 had acted as a distributor for several U.S. independent filmmakers, but excluded many others. Vogel exerted sole control over which films would be distributed and his decisions bred resentment among some of the filmmakers. Mekas’s account of the rift suggests that the members of the New American Cinema Group needed a distributor that would make all their films available: We needed an outlet controlled by ourselves, where no film would be rejected and all would be available.³³ Vogel, in turn, suggested that Mekas was engaging in a struggle for power: In my opinion, Jonas was more interested in building a Jonas empire than I was in building an Amos empire at Cinema 16.³⁴ In 1962, the New American Cinema Group established the Film-Maker’s Cooperative to distribute the films of avant-garde filmmakers. The following year, Cinema 16 closed due to financial pressures.

At the same time that Mekas was working with the New American Cinema Group and helping to form the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, he also began to publish some of his most daring and provocative pieces for the Voice. In his October 26, 1961 column, Mekas praised Brakhage—one of the filmmakers whose work he had labeled adolescent in 1955—and placed his work alongside that of Michelangelo Antonioni. In his November 9, 1961 column, Mekas assaulted Hollywood’s penchant for the offensively maudlin by describing the pompous monumentalism of Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg at a time when the American public was first confronting Nazi atrocities. Mekas’s March 15, 1962 column displayed another bit of heresy when he critiqued Alain Renais’s Last Year at Marienbad at the height of America’s uncritical love affair with French cinema. Mekas’s aesthetic stance was becoming more concrete and confident. Yet, Mekas was not only maturing as columnist, but also evolving as an artist. In 1961, Mekas completed his first film, Guns of the Trees (the film was not released until 1964). Guns of the Trees exemplifies the twin currents in Mekas’s aesthetic sensibilities. It has a minimalist and improvisational narrative that loosely tells the story of two young couples and the suicide of one of the two female protagonists. In this respect, it is similar to the kinds of films that Cassavetes, Frank and Leslie, and Clarke were making. In turn, the film’s nonlinear structure, inventive use of sound, and more surrealistic elements brings it closer to the films that Mekas was more vocally championing. Indeed, in the text that opens the film, Mekas describes his film as a poem. As Mekas was undergoing these shifts as a critic and filmmaker, Film Culture similarly became more focused on the New American Cinema.

By 1963, Mekas was writing for the Village Voice, editing Film Culture, finding venues to screen films from the Film-Maker’s Cooperative, and developing his own work as an artist. That same year, two events would occur that gained Mekas public attention as an artist and a critic as well as a reputation as a gadfly who flouted authority. In May, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s performance group, The Living Theatre, put on a production of Kenneth H. Brown’s play, The Brig. The play centered on a day in a military prison, depicting the brutal treatment of the prisoners. After Beck and Malina were charged with tax evasion, the IRS closed the production and the owners of the theater evicted the production company. Mekas was present at the final public performance. Shortly after the production was shut down, Beck and Malina arranged another performance of the play for Mekas to record. The landlords had locked the theatre, but Mekas and members of Living Theatre Company entered through the coal chute to film the play. Mekas’s camerawork skillfully amplifies the sense of austerity and brutality that the play seeks to convey. The film was Mekas’s first publicly acclaimed work and The Brig was awarded the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

In his April 18, 1963 Voice column, Mekas made his first mention of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and continued to praise it in numerous subsequent columns. With its display of nudes engaged in hetero- and homosexual play, Mekas rightly predicted that the film would be labeled pornographic, degenerate, homosexual, trite, disgusting, etc.³⁵ Mekas saw more in the film. For him, the film stood within an artistic tradition alongside the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud: It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.³⁶ The film had its premiere screening on April 29 at the Bleecker Street Cinema at a special midnight screening series run by the Film-Maker’s Cooperative.³⁷ Mekas, and the filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Florence Karpf organized a screening of the film on March 3, 1964, at the New Bowery Theatre. By this point, the film had begun to gain some notoriety and infamy. All three filmmakers were arrested at the screening. Later that month, Mekas was arrested a second time for screening Jean Genet’s homoerotic prison film, Un Chant d’Amour. Both incidents garnered media attention, placing Mekas and Smith in the spotlight. Mekas used his column to further inflame the situation, publicly denouncing politicians and reporting on the latest events in the case. The New York Criminal Court, ultimately, determined that Flaming Creatures was obscene, while the case against Un Chant d’Amour was dropped. Despite this outcome, the anticensorship campaign that Mekas had launched was remarkable in its scope and because of the support it elicited from public figures. Nonetheless, Smith never financially benefited from the film and, in later years, accused Mekas of using the film as a tool for self-promotion.

In the years following the Flaming Creatures case, Mekas organized an exposition of U.S. avant-garde films that toured Europe. The European tour exposed European artists to the developments occurring in American cinema and helped to strengthen ties between the European and American avant-garde. This contact with American avant-garde films attracted the attention of established filmmakers, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, and served as an inspiration for young filmmakers, like Chantal Akerman. By this time, both Mekas’s Voice column and Film Culture were almost exclusively devoted to promoting and critically evaluating the work of avant-garde filmmakers like Deren, Anger, Brakhage, Warhol, Jacobs, Kubelka, Markopoulos, Jerome Hill, Ed Emshwiller, Menken, Bruce Baillie, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and numerous others. Mekas increasingly portrayed these filmmakers as members of a unified movement, but their films were so different from one another and the relationships among them could range from mere acquaintance to outright hostility. It was Mekas who brought them and their films together. Later, the young film theorist P. Adams Sitney, who had begun writing for Film Culture and working with Mekas, would more carefully identify themes, styles, and aesthetics in these films.³⁸

In 1969, Mekas released Walden (originally titled Walden: Diaries, Notes, and Sketches), which he had begun filming in 1964. This was the first of Mekas’s diary films. It was followed in 1971 by Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, which Mekas filmed after receiving Soviet permission (in no small part due to his reputation as director of The Brig and as something of a dissident in the United States) to return to Lithuania for the first time since 1944. Both films, Sitney writes, are exercises in Romantic autobiography. Mekas constantly weaves together celebrations of the present moment, immediately and unironically present on the screen, with elegiac and ironic allusions to a presence that is forever absent to the camera lens: the vision of nature and of his childhood. Mekas’s two diaries are versions of the myth of lost innocence and the failed quest for recovery.³⁹ The style that is today most closely associated with Mekas’s work made its first appearance with these films. In them, Mekas united his poetic and cinematic aesthetic sensibilities. Mekas’s narration of the films draws from his poems and his decades of written diary entries. In this respect, Mekas’s cinema became interwoven with the artistic pursuits he had developed prior to his arrival in the United States.

Since the controversy over Flaming Creatures, there was a need for regular venues to screen the works of American avant-garde filmmakers. The Filmmakers’ Cinemathèque was an early attempt to create a home for avant-garde cinema, but it had no stable location, constantly moving to new screening spaces. With financial assistance from the filmmaker Jerome Hill, the Cinemathèque established itself as Anthology Film Archives in the building of Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York City. It officially opened on November 30, 1970, with Mekas as its director. Anthology Film Archives would serve as a theater, museum, and library not only for the screening and study of avant-garde cinema, but for the broader study and promotion of film as art. To help forge an identity as a leading museum of film art, Mekas, Sitney, the critic Ken Kelman, and filmmakers Peter Kubelka and James Broughton formed a committee to compile a list of films essential to the understanding and appreciation of film art. The Essential Cinema catalog would form the core of the Anthology’s collection and the films would be screened on a regular cycle. The death of Hill in 1972, however, forced the Anthology to relocate for five years to a much smaller space at 80 Wooster Street. With the exception of the release of Lost, Lost, Lost, a diary film that traced Mekas’s life from his days in Brooklyn’s Lithuanian community to his involvement with the avant-garde, Mekas devoted himself entirely to running Anthology Film Archives. The need for more space led to the acquisition of Manhattan’s Second Avenue Courthouse in 1979. Mekas worked to raise the funds for the purchase and reconstruction of the building so that it could house two theatres, a library, and a gallery. Anthology Film Archives reopened at the new location in October 1988.

The loss of Hill as its benefactor had led to years of a precarious existence for the Anthology. Mekas’s efforts to ensure the future of the institution in the wake of Hill’s death led him to retire his column for the Voice. He wrote his final piece for the Voice on July 7, 1975. The years that Mekas dedicated to the Anthology also saw the increasingly infrequent publication of Film Culture. Mekas continued to steadily release films, notably, Notes for Jerome, Paradise Not Yet Lost, and He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life, but his overall output was smaller and his films tended to be shorter than previous works. In the early 1990s, after the future of Anthology in its new home had become more secure, Mekas gradually began to increase the number of films he released, most of which focused on his friendships with figures like the Fluxus artist George Maciunas, Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, and others. He also began to transition from film to video. Yet, it was not until 2000 that Mekas released his most ambitious film in decades: As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. A diary film like his preceding films, the film covers roughly thirty years of Mekas’s life. It is also one of Mekas’s most personal films, an intimate portrait of Mekas’s life at one of its most difficult periods.⁴⁰

To date, As I Was Moving Ahead is Mekas’s last 16 mm film. He had begun using various video formats to record his life before making the film, but it was only after its release that he fully made the turn to digital cameras. Among his twenty-first-century films, his 365 Day Project (2007) marked Mekas’s foray into releasing his films on the internet. Every day, for a year, Mekas released a new short film. The twenty-first century has also marked the prolific publication of books with independent presses. Gaining greater international recognition, Mekas has traveled extensively across the world to appear at exhibitions of his work. He has also revisited his older films, turning stills from his films into prints. In 2007, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Centre opened in Vilnius. A six-DVD boxed set of his major works, ranging from The Brig to As I Was Moving Ahead has also been released. Mekas was both awarded a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2013. He is currently working on new films, several books, and preparing for exhibitions.

Mekas’s Humanist Criticism

Throughout his career, Mekas has courted controversy. This is evident in some of the episodes of his biography that I have recounted, but it is also clear that a willingness to challenge orthodoxies permeate his writings for the Voice. Mekas’s column is filled with bold polemical statements against mainstream cinema and arbiters of taste as well as declarations about the revolutionary character of the avant-garde. This has led some to accuse Mekas of displaying a stronger inclination toward showmanship and hyperbole than to serious film criticism.⁴¹ There is certainly some truth to this. But such tendencies in Mekas’s writings might be best explained by his sense, which was neither ungrounded nor irrational, that the future of the avant-garde would be in jeopardy if its defenders did not speak out loudly. The Flaming Creatures case taught him that the work of the critic might sometimes require the strategies of the activist and polemicist. Mekas was an engaged and activist critic. Still, understanding Mekas as the chief propagandist of the avant-garde is a fundamentally mistaken way of reading Mekas’s column and interpreting his more general motives. Above all else, Mekas’s Romantic humanism influenced his column.⁴² If one appreciates this feature of Mekas’s thought, it helps make greater sense of what Mekas was doing. Mekas’s anarchistic streak, which led him to attack cultural norms, was motivated by an ingrained commitment to the defense of a profoundly humanistic understanding of the function of culture. Hence, writing of the commercialism of the film industry, Mekas states, We know that the true meaning of art is not how much money it brings in…. What it brings is the aesthetic pleasures, the ecstasies of the soul. He adds, It is the human aspect, the ritual aspect, the growth-of-man aspect that is being forgotten.⁴³

Mekas’s writings should be read as an expression of a discourse in which criticism is tied to a sense that culture mattered. In the aftermath of postmodern cynicism about humanism and the conservative overtones that the concept of culture has now acquired, it is difficult to recapture the sense that art is a profoundly humane undertaking that can be emancipatory.⁴⁴ In this respect, Mekas’s sensibilities are tied to a tradition of cultural critique that dates, at the very least, back to the Romantics. But it also has certain ties to the projects of the cultural critics writing from the 1930s to the early 1970s. Though their diagnoses and conclusions differed dramatically from one another, critics on both the left and the right shared a sense that the health of a society could be measured by the extent to which the arts flourished and, in some sense more importantly, the kind of art that flourished within it. Moreover, the activity of cultural critique had to be an ongoing battle—one in which works of art had to constantly be revisited. Though Mekas can be understood within this context, he should also be understood as rebelling from within by seeking to introduce works of art into the public discourse that were either overlooked or willfully precluded.

Mekas entered into an ethico-cultural discourse that had been shaped by and included cultural critics as diverse as Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Herbert Marcuse, C. P. Snow, F. R. Leavis, Dwight MacDonald, Clement Greenberg, Meyer Shapiro, and others, but he rejected the aesthetic judgments and the categories that defined that discourse. Mekas could share the concerns of such critics over the monetization and dumbing down of culture, but reject the position—adopted by more conservative cultural critics—that avant-gardism in the arts was symptomatic of cultural decline.⁴⁵ Rather, the avant-garde resisted the deadening of culture. The language of cinema was changing and creating new possibilities. For Mekas, poetic cinema opened new vistas of experience that could lead to cultural revivification. It resisted staid and alienated forms of experience. The avant-garde represented, for him, a democratization of cinema—an art form whose development was restricted by the expenses it generally incurred. Avant-garde filmmakers were able to embrace a greater degree of independence in pursuing their work and control over it. This independence and control could emancipate the experience of the film viewer and the capacities of the filmmaker.

Mekas’s polemical writing style was a direct response to the hostility of most critics toward avant-garde cinema. Avant-gardism in other art forms, such as in literature, music, and painting, attracted greater support from critics. The filmmakers Mekas supported seldom received such appreciation. Mekas would, therefore, lash out at critics for their own cultural myopia. He lambasted the film criticism establishment’s focus on the mainstream. The film critic’s task was to actively seek out the most exciting art: That’s why I go back to the underground. I know that the majority of you cannot see this cinema; but that is exactly the point: It is my duty to bring this cinema to your attention. I will bark about it until our theatres start showing this cinema.⁴⁶ The dismissive attitudes toward avant-garde cinema represented, for Mekas, a kind of cultural barbarism. The defense of avant-garde films and filmmakers, which Mekas made the sole focus of his column in its later years, was crucial because it preserved a space for new kinds of cinematic innovation that were not happening anywhere else in the world. Mekas was not writing as an outside observer of the movement, but as one of its major participants. Yet, Mekas never fetishized experimentation for its own sake—thus, leading him to reject the term experimental to describe the films he championed. He saw the filmmakers he supported as heirs to a humanistic artistic enterprise. This placed Mekas in strange territory among film critics.

At the time that Mekas wrote film criticism, the field was dominated by a slew of influential critics who did not share his aesthetic sensibilities. When Mekas joined the Voice, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times was the preeminent critic writing on film in the United States. Despite Crowther’s towering presence during his twenty-seven years at the Times, from 1940 to 1967, his evaluation of films lacked versatility. Crowther could rarely see any value to films beyond those that carried the most accessible social messages. It was against this kind of simplistic moralization of cinema that a younger generation of film critics reacted. Mekas’s championing of the avant-garde represented one strand. Mekas’s friend Andrew Sarris, who utilized auteur theory to develop more sophisticated assessments of narrative cinema, represented another.⁴⁷ Yet, Mekas’s and Sarris’s writings could complement one another. This was partly true because the two rarely covered the same cinematic terrain. Mekas brought Sarris to write for the Voice and for Film Culture because he insisted that Hollywood films and the European New Wave be covered. Mekas did not himself have the time to do so as he increasingly devoted his energies to supporting avant-garde filmmakers. But both Mekas and Sarris—despite taking issue with many of the judgments passed on cinema by the older generation of cultural critics—could participate in the great debates over the meaning of the arts and their place in society. The true rupture among the younger generation of film critics was between those who took the debate seriously, like Mekas and Sarris, and those who did not, especially Pauline Kael.

Whereas Mekas battled for theatres to give the public access to a wider range of films, Kael, ultimately, celebrated the status quo: "Our mass culture has always been responsive to instincts and the needs of the public. Though it exploits those needs without satisfying them, it does nonetheless throw up images that indicate social tensions and undercurrents. Without this responsiveness, mass culture would sink on its own weight. But it doesn’t sink—there is a kind of vitality in it."⁴⁸ Kael was no cultural conservative, but her criticism lacked substance. She dismissed the debate over culture under the guise of irreverence and wit.⁴⁹ Kael mocked the kinds of concerns that could unite two so different critics as Mekas and Dwight MacDonald about the enrichment of culture.⁵⁰ Film was purely about entertainment. By embracing this position, Kael could dismiss the entire discussion about the relation between film and culture as elitist. Her lengthy polemics against Sarris or the German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer were a rejection of any attempt to articulate deeper vocabularies for discussing film as art. Kael’s writing was a positive affirmation of cinema as reified entertainment. Her values could be brought most sharply into relief in what she had to say about the avant-garde: Yet why are the Hollywood movies, even the worst overstuffed ones, often easier to sit through than the short experimental ones? Because they have actors and a story.⁵¹

Kael’s long-standing conflict with Sarris over auteur theory is notorious in the history of film criticism. Early in her career, however, she would assail Sarris and Mekas in the same breath.⁵² Referring to avant-garde cinema, she wrote, The spokesmen for this cinema attack rationality as if it were the enemy of art (‘as/ the heavy Boots of Soldiers and Intellect/ march across the/ flowerfields of subconscious’ and so forth by Jonas Mekas). They have composed a rather strange amalgam in which reason=lack of feeling and imagination=hostility to art=science=the enemy=Nazis and police=the Bomb. Somewhere along the line, criticism is also turned into an enemy of art.⁵³ In her attacks, Kael could tactfully position herself as the defender of serious criticism without having anything to say about what function such criticism should serve.⁵⁴ For Mekas, it served a clear purpose: to challenge mundane experience and widen the horizon of aesthetic experience. It is unclear what, if anything, Kael stood for. Not only did Kael see herself as defending serious criticism from Mekas and Sarris, she also saw herself as battling their intellectual snobbery. Kael warned, Cinema, I suspect, is going to become so rarefied, so private in meaning, and so lacking in audience appeal that in a few years the foundations will be desperately and hopelessly trying to bring it back to life, as they are now doing with theater.⁵⁵ Of course, Kael was wrong.

Today, theaters are dominated by remakes of remakes, sequels to sequels, and an endless tide of films that capture the golden mean exemplified by blockbusters that can be marketed to both children and adults—stunting one and infantilizing the other. In her faux populism, Kael failed to recognize that, for the studios, audience appeal meant the dumbing down of culture motivated by profit. She also missed the point that Mekas was making with his writing: Cinema could be better. It should not complacently fall back on staid and banal techniques. It could expand the horizons of experience, rather than serve as escapism. As Mekas notes in a rebuttal to Kael, These critics keep telling us: You can’t do this in cinema; you can’t do that; this belongs to literature; this belongs to painting, or science.⁵⁶ Kael promoted a caricature of avant-garde cinema. Kael’s warning about a rarefied cinema without audience appeal proved wrong. Instead, Mekas proved the more prophetic. Implicit in his defense of a more expansive cinema was the fear that an ever more commercialized cinema would stifle innovation not merely at a technical level, but also a more innovatively humanist cinema.

Mekas was not a snobbish film critic, but he was not a philistine either. Where Kael saw the studios as giving the people what they want, Mekas understood that the development of the art form was under attack, that it could be smothered by its dependency on the familiar. And it is the familiar that has been the most lucrative. Yet, Kael’s style of criticism has, by and large, become the standard and celebrated form of the craft. This has rendered the critic a cog in advertising campaigns. Mekas’s writing sought to rebuff that tendency. Mekas was a critic who actively sought out the innovators. He was both critic and evangelist. He not only wrote about what cinema was, but what it could be. For Mekas, it was not an issue of either Hollywood or avant-garde cinema. Both are, as Mekas still likes to put it, branches in the tree of cinema. But Mekas understood that arts under the dominion of the mainstream would become ever more reified and would cultivate an increasingly unreflective and infantilized audience.⁵⁷ On this issue, he could agree with people like Greenberg or MacDonald.

Why Read Mekas?

My interpretation of Mekas’s criticism in the preceding section and, in particular, my highlighting Kael’s contrasting view of criticism is meant to draw attention to a deeper question about the function of criticism. In the pages that follow, the reader will undoubtedly take issue with some of Mekas’s columns. Readers may disagree with his judgments or dislike his writing style. One may not even find any value in the film movement he has championed for over six decades. But what the reader should appreciate is the sense of urgency he conveys about the status of art. The practice of art criticism becomes sterilized when it is reduced to guidance for what an audience should or not see. It is domesticated when it becomes divorced from the question of culture’s value. Such forms of criticism are symptomatic of a society that no longer sees art as an integral public good. They exemplify a social detachment from art. Mekas’s film column opposed such tendencies. His advocacy of the avant-garde ran deeper than support for a specific artistic movement. His fight on behalf of the avant-garde was informed by a principled defense of aesthetic experience as a humanizing experience.

For Kael, the purpose of criticism was to distinguish between good films and bad films. Criticism was synonymous with taste. The critic has his or her likes and dislikes and recruits a following to the extent that an audience agrees with those assessments. Kael helped to bestow such a self-conception of the task of the critic to a younger generation of film critics. For Mekas, the stakes were much higher. Mekas was not writing for good movies and against bad movies. He wrote on behalf of films that resisted conservative mores and easy consumption. He wrote in favor of cinematic evolution and against stagnancy. Our aesthetic sensibilities only develop to the extent to which we live in a society that cultivates art and artists that can challenge how we see, hear, and feel. Mekas may have disagreed with the particular claims of the generation of cultural critics who preceded him, but, like them, he recognized a dialectical relationship between art and society. New and compelling works of art could combat a docile society. Art can contribute to the emancipation of experience. Yet, a society that places constrictions on the understanding of art can foster the calcification of experience and the production of ever more reified works of art.⁵⁸

The crisis of art criticism is the devolution of the task of the critic to passing judgments of taste. Art becomes stratified. It caters to specific milieus and audiences. The critic becomes a glorified advertiser. Art loses its deeper cultural import. The experience of art becomes detached. In such a situation, audiences gravitate to what is familiar—whether the familiar takes the form of the most accessible blockbuster or most esoteric film. Mekas’s vision of an