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Though best known as a poet in Lithuania, his country of birth, Jonas Mekas is arguably the single most important figure in the American avant-garde cinema. Given his critical role in the founding of Anthology Film Archives, the Film-makers' Cooperative and Film Culture magazine, there's no question that the course of avant-garde film history would be significantly different without Mekas. Yet paradoxically, the godfather of the New American Cinema-he even coined the term in the late Fifties-makes films that hardly seem American at all. While Mekas continues to embrace the American avant-garde, his own work is that of an expatriate.
Mekas arrived in the U.S. in 1949, a Lithuanian refugee fresh from a displaced persons camp. Shortly thereafter, he started filming with a 16mm Bolex, and hasn't stopped since. He began his epic cycle of film diaries, which includes Walden (64-69), Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania (71-72), and Lost, Lost, Lost (76). The most recent installment, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, premiered this year at the Berlin Film Festival.
The self-effacing modesty of Mekas's insistence that "I am not a filmmaker, I am a filmer" recalls the Victorian poet John Clare's statement, "I found the poems in the fields/and only wrote them down." Mekas is indeed the arcadian poet...