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[Special Screening]
100th Birthday Commemorative Program
Jonas MEKAS – Film Program in Three Chapters

2/4/2023 15:00- 2/10/2023 15:00- 2/19/2023 11:00-

Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 1F Hall

[Special Screening] <br>100th Birthday Commemorative Program<br>Jonas MEKAS – Film Program in Three Chapters

Jonas MEKAS, Award Presentation to Andy Warhol, 1964 / 12 min.
Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

The three chapters of the program seek to tease out new angles of approaching Jonas Mekas’s film works, and expose his filmic practice in the broader context of the American avant-garde scene, emphasizing the impact of Mekas’s intellectual, organizational, and administrative activities; his devotion in fostering new habits of looking at film as an art form; as well as the diversity of contexts that inspired the filmmaker. (Inesa BRAŠIŠKĖ, Lukas BRASISKIS)

Guest Programmers: Inesa BRAŠIŠKĖ, Lukas BRASISKIS

Dates: 2.4 Sat. 15:00- w/ Q&A session: Inesa Brašiškė, Lukas Brasiskis
2.10 Fri. 15:00-
2.19 Sun. 11:00-
Venue: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 1F Hall
Ticket: ¥1,500 [advance] / ¥1,800 [door]

 

※Running time (e.g. of movie) 218 min. ( tentative, Including break )

Chapter 1 : 84 min.

Chapter 2 : 73 min. 30sec.

Break Time : 10 min.

Chapter 3 : 50 min.

 

 

Works

CHAPTER 1: To Write History and to Be Written into History: Documents and Portraits of the New York Avant-Garde

Jonas Mekas’s cinematographic vocabulary is autobiographical; it combines both fiction and documentary, and merges personal experience with the sociocultural landscape of his time. His works are charged with immense historical value, as Mekas recorded some of the most significant events of the postwar years and the now legendary figures of the New York avant-garde art scene, including Andy Warhol in his Factory, the American theatre company The Living Theatre, and Fluxus impresario George Maciunas. But Mekas, in his capacity as the organizer, critic, and creator of the infrastructure of the filmic avant-garde, himself became a key figure of the American postwar art scene, and was captured on fellow filmmakers’ cameras.
ジョナス・メカス《アンディ・ウォーホルの授賞式》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Award Presentation to Andy Warhol</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Award Presentation to Andy Warhol

1964 / 12 min. / 16mm film / sound
Collection of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

ジョナス・メカス《ゼフィーロ・トルナー、あるいはジョージ・マチューナス（フルクサス）の生活風景》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Zefiro Torna, or, Scenes from the life of George Maciunas (Fluxus)</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Zefiro Torna, or, Scenes from the life of George Maciunas (Fluxus)

1992 / 35 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / Dialogues in English (with Japanese subtitles) / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ストーム・デ・ハーシュ《Newsreel: Jonas in the Brig》 Storm de HIRSCH, <em>Newsreel: Jonas in the Brig</em>

Storm de HIRSCH, Newsreel: Jonas in the Brig

1964 / 5 min. /silent/digital (original=16mm film) / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ギデオン・バックマン《Jonas》 Gideon BACHMANN, <em>Jonas</em>

Gideon BACHMANN, Jonas

1968 / 32 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / Dialogues in English (with Japanese subtitles)
Distributed by RE:VOIR

CHAPTER 2: Flâneur with a Camera

“Jonas Mekas was standing still” read a card sent by Jonas Mekas to the Japanese artist and Fluxus member Shiomi Mieko in 1965, upon the invitation to contribute to her series of global word events collectively titled Spatial Poem. Direction Event (1965), a second event in the series, sought to record various directions to which people were simultaneously moving or facing at 10pm (Greenwich time) on October 15th, 1965. Though Mekas’s reply contained a brief “standing still,” it was, on the contrary, itinerancy, dispersion and connectivity rather than sedentariness that characterized his output and indeed, a form of living.
Mekas’s life and career were profoundly marked by geographical mobility. In what is likely the most celebrated body of his work, Mekas captured the feeling of homelessness – of having nowhere to go – as an existential state stemming from the traumatic experience of forced migration, and portrayed the lives of displaced persons, first and foremost the Lithuanian immigrants’ community in New York. Mobility was indeed integral to the entirety of his filmic corpus, his Bolex 16mm film camera accompanying Mekas on a daily basis as he moved through the streets, cities and continents putting those images together years later into one of his diary films. And Mekas did travel: to visit friends, but also for a much less exposed reason – to fulfill his administrative and curatorial roles. The subject of itinerancy is brought into sharp relief – in other words, it becomes the subject in a series of travelogues collectively called Travel Songs.
ジョナス・メカス《Williamsburg, Brooklyn》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Williamsburg, Brooklyn</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

2003 / 15 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / silent / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ジョナス・メカス《カシス》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Cassis</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Cassis

1966 / 4 min. 30 sec. / digital (original=16mm film) / sound / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ジョナス・メカス《旅の歌》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Travel Songs</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Travel Songs

1967-1981 / 25 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / Dialogues in English (with Japanese subtitles) / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ジョナス・メカス《Song of Avignon》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Song of Avignon</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Song of Avignon

1998 / 5 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / Dialogue in English (with Japanese subtitles)
Distributed by RE:VOIR

ジョナス・メカス《富士山への道すがら、わたしが見たものは…》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>On My Way to Fujiyama, I Saw...</em>

Jonas MEKAS, On My Way to Fujiyama, I Saw...

1996 / 25 min. / 16mm film / Sound（Dalius Naujokaitis）

Distributed by Mekas Nihon Nikki No Kai

CHAPTER 3: The Motion of Time and Eye: A Special Screening of Films by Marie MENKEN

The postwar avant-garde film scene in New York was a largely male dominated milieu. The original Essential Cinema Repertory conceived at Anthology Film Archives in the 70s infamously includes only a few works by women filmmakers. However, upon arrival in his newly adopted home in New York, Jonas Mekas had found outstanding women filmmakers already working in the American avant-garde cinema as filmmakers and organizers, such as Maya Deren, Shirley Clark, and Storm de Hirsch, who would each leave marks in Mekas’s own professional life and filmic sensibility. Among such artists was painter-turned-filmmaker Marie Menken, a legendary figure of the NY artistic underground and a major influence on many avant-garde filmmakers, including Mekas. After seeing works by Menken at the Charles Theatre in 1962, Mekas wrote in his Village Voice column: “The realist sees only the front of a building, the outlines, a street, a tree. Menken sees in them the motion of time and eye. She sees the motions of heart in a tree. She sees through them and beyond them. She retains a visual memory of all that she sees.”
マリー・メンケン《Glimpses of the Garden》 Marie MENKEN, <em>Glimpses of the Garden</em>

Marie MENKEN, Glimpses of the Garden

1957 / 4 min. / digital (original=16mm film) / sound / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

マリー・メンケン《Notebook》 Marie MENKEN, <em>Notebook</em>

Marie MENKEN, Notebook

1962 / 10 min. / digital (original=16mm film) /silent / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

マリー・メンケン《Go Go Go》 Marie MENKEN, <em>Go Go Go</em>

Marie MENKEN, Go Go Go

1964 / 11 min. 30 sec. / digital (original=16mm film) /silent / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

マリー・メンケン《ライツ》 Marie MENKEN, <em>Lights</em>

Marie MENKEN, Lights

1966 / 6 min. 30 sec. / digital (original=16mm film) /silent / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

マリー・メンケン《Sidewalks》 Marie MENKEN, <em>Sidewalks</em>

Marie MENKEN, Sidewalks

1966 / 6 min. 30 sec. / silent / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

ジョナス・メカス《サーカス・ノート》 Jonas MEKAS, <em>Notes on the Circus</em>

Jonas MEKAS, Notes on the Circus

1966 / 12 min. / digital (original=16mm film) /sound / Distributed by The Film-Makers’ Cooperative

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