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Okay.

Here I am.

Here is me...

...by myself.

Here is my hand...

here is my face...

my hair...

my heart.

Here is my heart. Somewhere there.

Here I am.

Me, me.

Where is me?

What is me?

What was my life all about?

Do I still have time to do something about my life?

I really don't know.

Some called him the godfather of underground film.

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

That's Jonas Mekas.

My guest tonight is Jonas Mekas,

who was first of all a poet before he was a filmmaker.

I was a farmer before I was a filmmaker.

His name is Jonas Mekas,

a man who I think more than almost anybody in the world

epitomizes the meaning and significance

of independent film-making.

I'm delighted to have you here.

I'm happy to be here on this autumn day.

Jonas Mekas has remained at the forefront

of American independent film-making

for more than half a century.

Author, critic, film distributor,

and a movie maker whose influence extends

far beyond his adopted home.

Jonas Mekas was the most exciting person.

I mean, he just got excited about anything.

Jonas became a social center as well as making his own films

and writing his own poetry.

I began keeping film diaries

immediately after I came to this country.

The dominant form of my life became the diary.

So I'm just filming moments of life.

I do not know what makes me do it,

but I have to do it.

I just have to do it.

I cannot sleep.

I cannot sleep. Oh, boy.

I don't know what I'm going to do tonight.

Boxes, boxes.

Why all my life is boxed?

I have boxed myself into, I dunno where I am.

It's a mess. It's a mess.

As I'm slowly moving to my editing room...

Some old footage, fading, fading footage.

My friends...

here I am trying to remember it all.

Footage I took with my first Bolex,

but the dust of time is falling on all of it.

My brother, Adolfas.

Some of the details

are already deep under the dust of time.

Adolfas and I came here from post-war Europe...

full of doubts about civilization,

all the affairs of this world.

We loved you, world...

but you did lousy things to us.

We are displaced persons...

and the world is full of us.

This was recorded by someone in exile.

I was so lonely when I came...

that this city...

...saved my sanity.

The first years here,

we embraced New York,

and the city embraced us.

We did not miss a single theater performance,

a single film that opened,

a single ballet performance, music...

We were hungry, thirsty for...

...art.

It's raining in New York on this November day.

My camera is getting wet, but it doesn't matter.

Orchard Street. I lived here.

I lived here for two years.

Walking, always walking.

That is the life of a displaced person.

A DP in a strange place.

Grass clinging the block of cement,

trying to live in a place

where life seems to be totally impossible.

And there, behind that bridge, it's Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

I spent two years of my life there. Two.

There is a point somewhere

where you don't know anymore where your home really is.

I am still at that point.

I think my real home is cinema.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas,

born in Lithuania, came to the US,

and the first thing they did

was they bought a 16 millimeter Bolex camera.

Neither myself nor my brother spoke English.

We thought maybe we can do the camera and speak with images.

Jonas carried his camera everywhere.

I don't think I ever saw Jonas without a camera.

We thought we will get into Hollywood

and make big movies there,

but meanwhile, we have to practice

and master what the camera can do, all the tricks.

Very soon it was cinema that was our lives,

our minds, our hearts.

And we wished that we would have some kind of platform

to exchange ideas.

France had "Cahiers du Cinéma."

England had "Sight and Sound."

In United States, nothing.

So we said -- said, "Let's do it."

By December '54,

we brought out the first issue.

For "Film Culture Magazine,"

I wrote a piece about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,

John Ford's film.

I think I made 25 bucks,

which got me through a couple of dates.

The first play I directed off Broadway,

Jonas came to see it with his brother, Adolfas,

and that's where we met.

And he was very kind and very encouraging,

encouraging me to make movies,

which I ended up doing.

But for "Film Culture," yeah,

I wrote for them a couple of -- few times.

After you started "Film Culture,"

you got into being the first film critic

for The Village Voice writing about commercial cinema.

But your writing now,

it is primarily a criticism of the avant-garde.

It happened so not by, you know, our choice,

but I see great, you know, beauty, excitement there,

and nobody's writing about them.

Nobody's bringing these films to the, you know,

reader's, viewer's attention.

And that I consider is a crime.

So it's my duty to bring those films

to the attention of the people.

Jonas Mekas was my savior.

Somehow I knew about The Village Voice and I got it,

and I used to read Jonas's column, "Movie Journal,"

and he told me what underground movies were.

And that's how I learned about Warhol and Kenneth Anger

and the Kuchar Brothers and all those kind of movies.

So I became kind of obsessed by them.

And I would sneak away on the Greyhound Bus to New York

and see the underground movies that Jonas wrote about.

That's how I got my film education.

Before I was a film student,

I'd just live every week to read Jonas's column

in The Village Voice because it opened up a whole new world of,

uh, what cinema could be.

The word "movie" didn't mean just one thing anymore

to the younger generation.

You have lighter equipment,

so you can actually start making your own films.

Underground movies, we're doing it

a completely different way.

Turning your nose up at Hollywood.

Technique and billion-dollar budgets and everything,

You can step out in the street with your characters.

If all your expenses were subway fare and film,

you could somehow work.

You didn't eat so good, but you could work.

And that Jonas valued the work was amazing.

He couldn't have been more generous.

For the first time in the last ten years,

I did not feel alone in America.

Like I was...

slowly becoming a part of it.

There was a moment when I forgot my home.

We wrote.

We did a lot of writing

with coffee eating our stomachs.

We started shooting our first film.

It was exciting.

Everything was new.

I was a teenager reading Jonas's "Movie Journal"

in The Village Voice, and I went to Cinema 16,

where, mixed in with narrative films and science films

and pornography, were these other films.

And that's when I first saw Maya Deren...

...and Stan Brakhage.

And I thought, "This is most ridiculous stuff

I've ever seen."

And then I saw Jonas's Guns of the Trees...

...and I never wanted to go back to Cinema 16 after that

because it was the most depressing thing

that I'd ever seen.

Not everyone digs underground movies,

but those who do can dig them here.

This is The Bridge in New York,

one of several small theaters around the country

where underground films are shown.

But what is an underground movie?

The subject almost defies description.

Like any art, cinema has the narrative aspect

and the poetic aspect,

and so-called underground filmmakers

are exploring the poetic aspect of cinema.

Jonas was interested in freedom of expression

with an emphasis on individuality,

the personal, sometimes very private,

that Hollywood will never make.

And he saw that these films couldn't get distribution.

So what did Jonas do?

He started The Film-Makers' Co-op.

The Film-Makers' Cooperative

distributed Mondo Trasho.

That was the first real distributor I ever got.

Taxi! Taxi!

It was in the catalog,

and they would pay a dollar a minute, 90 minutes long.

So I got $90 every time somebody rented it.

Anyone could deposit a film

at The Film-Makers' Cooperative,

and it would be distributed if people asked for it.

And how would people know to ask for it?

Well, Jonas mentioned them in The Village Voice.

No one would've ever heard of those movies,

if not for Jonas.

He essentially wrote about the films

that his friends were making.

And the reason The Village Voice regarded this

not as a conflict of interest for many years

is that no one made any money.

When I started working at the Co-Op,

it was at 414 Park Avenue South,

and Jonas lived in the back.

Film-Makers' Cooperative

was a period of like four years.

I don't know how I slept,

because it was always busy, that place.

Most of the time I slept under my Moviola.

There was no other room.

Every evening we had screenings,

filmmakers bringing their footage,

people gathering and showing their work.

You could meet everybody there from Robert Frank,

Allen Ginsberg, Salvador Dalí.

They all came to the screenings.

It was at those screenings

that I met Barbara Rubin,

Harry Smith, Jack Smith, and Warhol.

Andy was there in my loft,

sitting on the floor watching movies already several months,

but I did not know it was Andy.

That was Andy's film school.

Jonas certainly gave Andy

the idea of making films.

And for a period of time,

Warhol pretty much put away painting

in favor of making films.

They were the most important thing that Warhol was doing.

But this evening,

as I was, um, eating my supper,

it came to me that, Andy's constant audio taping...

constant in the later years...

video taping, it came from shyness.

A shy person is not able 100% to connect

with the people

and remains always a little bit on the side.

A watcher. A looker. A gazer.

Because that is like one's only protection.

It is the chain that keeps you attached

to the people around you.

That is what I have been thinking...

...yeah, as I think about Andy.

To you.

There were two kinds of underground movies.

There was the real arty kind like Stan Brakhage,

and Ed Emshwiller.

I didn't like them so much then.

I like them now and realize

that Jonas was completely right about that school too.

But then there was the Warhol, Kenneth Anger,

Kuchar, the ones I liked really,

that always had nudity and gay people and drugs.

You know, when people think of the '60s,

they think of just this counterculture,

anything goes, nudity, sex.

But actually the censorship then was terrible.

I'll never forget, I went to forbidden screening,

an illegal screening of a banned film

at a loft in the Village,

and Mekas introduced it.

It was Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.

It was certainly a life-changer for me.

If you look at the history of queer film

and you look at the history of avant-garde film,

they are twined around each other.

And that was a big deal for Jonas,

who began writing in The Village Voice

some very homophobic pieces.

And then at a certain point,

he looked at Jack Smith's work,

and he realized that Jack was making

great film and great art,

and something changed profoundly in Jonas.

During the summer of '64,

the series of arrests

were taking place under the pretext of obscenity.

We decided that they have no right to tell us

how to make our movies or what to show.

We went ahead and we showed everything

without submitting to the censors.

Jonas booked the screening of Flaming Creatures.

I was the manager of the theater,

and Flo's taking tickets.

Cops came out of nowhere.

I was arrested. Flo was arrested.

Jonas was arrested

and was incredibly courageous talking to the cops,

telling them how stupid they were.

I thought he was gonna get us killed,

or at least we were gonna leave there without teeth.

I was impressed.

I don't think anyone was prepared

to see the cops show up.

After this arrest,

when everybody said I'm in trouble, I thought, "Okay,

then I will make it worse."

A week after Flaming Creatures,

Jonas arranged the screening of

Un chant d'amour.

He had smuggled the Genet semi-pornographic,

or actually pornographic, film into the country,

looking for trouble with the police.

Jonas said, "It's not porn.

Porn is in the eyes of the beholder.

It's poetry."

Police were threatened

by underground movies for some reason.

They really believed that they were gonna,

I don't know, do what?

Make everybody go crazy and turn gay or what?

I don't know what they thought.

For Jonas, it made him a hero, the revolutionary.

He introduced a new genre of rebellion in film

that has never ended.

Jonas wanted to break down the barriers,

storm the Bastille.

He talked like that, too.

"We have to take it down and break it down!"

And that was very encouraging at that time,

for all us young people that were just starting out.

There was so much dedication and solidarity

of the whole community,

and in the middle there was Jonas Mekas.

He was the prophet, a guiding visionary spirit.

He showed us the way and made us understand

that there are no limits to the art of cinema.

We have all come here to tell the public that, uh,

we are now, uh, taking over the entire universe.

What's important about the underground cinema

is that it's not important at all.

The underground filmmakers

are not taking themselves seriously.

They're just playing, having a good time.

Jonas Mekas, Jonas Mekas, the impresario.

Jonas is the head of The Film-Makers' Cooperative.

He puts together movies and sends them around to,

uh, Europe and America. Mm-hmm.

Movies like Flaming Creatures and The Brig.

Good morning, men!

Now, this will be another glorious day

in this great United States Marine Corps.

The thing is that The Brig is a film

of an actual performance of the living theater.

Yes. It was shot on stage.

I walked into the middle of the play, with the camera,

with sound...

When I walk by, you come to attention!

Is that clear?!

...disrupted the whole situation as a new element.

It was not an adaptation filming of a play,

but my instantaneous reaction to a production

in long ten-minute takes.

With the movement of the camera, the brutality of it,

uh, uh, was sort of crazy.

Are all my kiddies asleep?

The Brig showed at the Venice Film Festival.

They thought it was a real brig

as opposed to the documentary of a theater production,

but it did win a prize,

and it did put Jonas on the map,

though still as some kind of curator.

People didn't see Jonas as a filmmaker in his own right

until Diaries, Notes and Sketches -- Walden.

I live...

...therefore I make films.

I make films...

therefore I make...

I make home movies.

Therefore, I live.

Walden was the first Jonas film

that really moved me.

It was like, wow, this is like its own form completely.

Jonas was able to use the form of cinema

in the way poets don't obey the laws of prose.

They don't obey the laws or rules.

They are there to abstract them.

Jonas's personal cinema

represented an entire vocabulary

of symbols and signifiers,

and there was no goal.

Diaristic, memoirist documentarian...

through the eyes of a poet.

Around 1961, looking back, I realized that

the footage I've shot with my first two Bolexes

felt like a diary documenting certain aspects of my life.

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches,

this footage from 1964 to '68...

...I'm not documenting reality.

That doesn't interest me, but I'm celebrating reality.

I'm picking out certain bits, and I film them in a way

that they are like celebrations of life.

Temperament, attitude, state of being,

that feeling, like, in the air.

Pace, rhythm, movement, light, exposure,

focus, intensity, how I feel

as I'm looking at that detail

to catch reality as it happens now.

That is how my diary form started.

Jonas was an expert at turning his journals and diaries

into his art.

Walden and Lost, Lost, Lost

are two of my favorite films of -- of not just of Jonas's,

but two of my favorite films ever.

Lost, Lost, Lost stuck with me a great deal,

particularly when he was filming the grass.

You know, like he was dancing around with his camera,

fluidly in space,

so ecstatically happy.

Jonas and images of Jonas with a Bolex camera

reminded me of Woody Guthrie's guitar that he had --

"This machine kills fascists."

That guitar was his way of delivering things,

and Jonas's Bolex was equally iconic to me.

This machine destroys

preconceptions of what is filmmaking.

The camera to Jonas,

it's like basketball to Michael Jordan

or Jimi Hendrix playing the guitar

for Christ's sake, you know?

It's just part of his body,

coordinated so naturally, so fluidly.

He was in his element.

And that's a very important thing to recognize.

God, you know Jonas as a person is super shy,

sometimes painfully so,

especially when he's been caught in some kind of crowd.

Jonas was the oddest person

to be at the center

of so many different stratas of society.

He was highly regarded in Park Avenue living rooms,

in the homes of great art collectors.

He was omnipresent on the scene,

and he always deflected accolades from himself

to, like, "Well, but did you see this?

Did you hear about this?"

He had a lot of access to people

because they recognized Jonas's integrity, the purity.

He was telling the tales of his own life

and the people he encountered, and some of those people

happened to be, you know, Miles Davis,

or John and Yoko,

or all these different luminaries of the period.

Scrambled eggs? Yes, scrambled eggs.

Jonas doesn't have the same ambition.

He doesn't really wanna be that famous when you think about it.

Whether he's hanging out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono,

or following the cockroach

just trying to get across the street,

he'd have the similar joy and attention being paid

to those moments.

There's no hierarchy between Yoko Ono,

John Lennon, cockroach.

He always talked about that glimpse of beauty in paradise.

That was it.

Being caught in the moment.

Very important philosophy of life.

It's my nature now to record,

to try to keep everything I'm passing through.

I have lost too much.

It's raining in Soho...

...and I have lots of time.

I'm not in a hurry, really.

I don't mind it at all...

...for this rain to rush to the streets of New York.

After...

coming 7,000 miles from home, from Lithuania...

it doesn't matter.

100 blocks, one way or the other.

I'm on Broadway,

and it's raining 7,000 miles away.

The editor of Pravda, propaganda newspaper of Russia,

he had seen The Brig,

and he thought it was a great anti-American film...

...and that it should be shown in Moscow Film Festival.

And I said, "I will come,

but at the same time, I would like that to go...

if I'm in Moscow, maybe I could go also to Lithuania

and visit my mother."

So that took me to my mother.

And as we were approaching,

closer and closer to the places we knew so well...

...retracing bits of past...

...I did not recognize the places.

There were no trees when we left.

We planted small seedlings all around, yes,

and now the little seedlings

had grown up into big, large trees.

And there was Mama...

and she was waiting.

She was waiting for...

25 years.

Our home, our house, was still there,

and a cat met us.

Our mother is telling about the terrible post-war years,

and how every night for a year

the police was waiting behind the house in the bushes

for me to come home.

They thought I had joined the partisans.

For more than a year, behind the bathhouse.

The dogs used to bark every night, she said.

My decision is to leave.

If you want to criticize me

for my lack of patriotism or courage,

you can go to hell.

I do not want any part of this war.

This war is not mine.

I am a poet.

False papers were made for us

to go to the University of Vienna

and study there, and there we went.

The only thing was that we never got there.

Germans directed our train towards Hamburg,

and we ended in the slave camps of the Nazi Germany.

One thing that people always forget

about Jonas is that he's a survivor

of one of the worst mass slaughters

in human history.

And even after the war,

Jonas and Adolfas were lost in that mix

of people who were trying to figure out how to get home.

They were not welcome in Soviet-occupied Lithuania.

They had to stay in a displaced person's camp for four years.

And it's at this point that he begins

to really develop as a poet.

This is when he writes his Idylls of Semeniskiai.

By the time I ended up in the fourth labor camp,

I only wanted to write.

And my first poetry book was published

in a very cheap way in displaced person camps.

I got to know him

through the book called Jonas Mekas' Poetry,

which was published in 1971,

because previously in Lithuania,

his poetry wasn't available.

I found a book in my parents' library.

It sounded different

than the Lithuanian poetry I knew.

The country really has a difficult history,

which was a living trauma for the generation of Jonas Mekas.

Jonas consolidated that historical experience

of the country and its people

and expressed it in this very personal way.

Now that I speak, I suddenly realize that

I was probably only a few years younger than Jonas himself

when he started his journey away from Lithuania.

"The darkness is falling

beyond the windows.

All the past is falling together."

Just two lines from Jonas's poetry.

What more do you want from me?

I am a musician.

I became a politician,

participant of my nation's self liberation...

from longstanding Soviet yoke.

Jonas's world...

was a very painful one...

and full of miracles.

It looks paradoxical.

Jonas speaks about the most simple things...

...and then you understand that they are the most important.

The element of past...

was especially important for Jonas,

maybe as a representative of captive nation,

which was stored out from reality,

put into a cage of captivity.

Who cannot understand it?

Maybe those who have not been captive...

enslaved.

But those who don't have such experiences...

maybe they lose something.

That terrible chance

to have such a painful experience.

Today, I was leaving. It was raining.

The airport was wet, it was sad.

Oh, Mother...

I hope the long gray road

will lead me soon home again.

"Kreutzer Sonata," that's what I need.

As I sit here in my editing room,

splicing bits of my own past,

putting all these pieces together...

...I'm looking at fragments of mine and your life.

These are my memories,

the way I saw it when I was filming it.

I'm talking to you, Hollis.

When I met Jonas,

it wasn't like the sparks and all of that,

'cause that's not the way he was.

He wasn't like a sparky person.

He was, like, slow and...

...really charismatic and powerful.

He was 22 years older than me, and he was also...

Jonas Mekas, you know?

And I was just a person who liked avant-garde film.

But he really made me feel calm,

and he really made me feel...

...um...

happy.

I had seen Walden and Reminisces,

and I read Jonas's columns.

It's like I had always known him.

Then he came and lived with me pretty quick.

He brought his editing table.

Hollis and me, the protagonists of this film.

We decided to try to be like

all the normal, serious people.

We decided to get married.

And there is the man of the minute...

...and Hollis's father.

I can still feel the happiness

of that summer being in love.

If there is beauty,

that was beauty, my friend.

It was magical and fun.

He was a very free spirit.

Like, Jonas is one of the funniest people

I have ever met.

And, yeah, he always had his camera with him.

It was like his sidekick.

And it makes that click.

I love that click.

Midnight, mon ami! Happy New Year!

Peter, standing now at his window

with the fireworks going off all around him

is the tiny figure of the pope.

What? What happened to you?

I -- I meant to darken my hair,

and it -- it darkened it a little too much, Dad.

Yeah, meant to do dark brown,

but it ended up being little darker.

I have to fix that.

A liberal economy, free market, human rights,

respect for our neighbors and respect for our partners.

The time now is, according to Einstein.

Seize the problems

and the opportunities of this ever small planet

we all call home.

In short, if we want the story of the 21st century

to be the triumph of peace and harmony,

we must embrace our common humanity.

It's about 17 minutes to the end of this millennium.

New Year's, 1999.

As the world is celebrating the New Year...

I am celebrating

the last quarter of the 20th century.

It seems I was filming my own childhood

as I was filming your childhood,

Oona and Sebastian.

Formative years of being in front of a camera,

it just became natural.

I didn't love it or hate it.

It was just totally normal up to a certain age.

I think I was about 13 when I just started doing this

and walking away.

'Cause, you know, 13, puberty and all of it,

you're changing and you're just like,

"Stop filming me. Like, just stop."

Luckily, I had a younger brother

and then he ended up in all the films

because he was smaller and didn't care.

If you've only grown up with a -- a camera...

If you grew up your whole childhood with that,

you don't think anything funny or strange of it.

So, I was aware that my birth was filmed.

I didn't feel icky or weird about it.

It was just something that was part of life.

As I was watching you in that moment,

I thought...

"There cannot be anything more beautiful

or more important on this Earth."

1974.

It was a really monumental year.

In '74, we got married,

we had Oona,

and we moved into The Loft in SoHo.

I still have dreams about that place, The Loft.

"The Loft." I mean, that's what everybody called it.

It was this big meeting space.

The long wooden table that we had in the house

was a very busy space.

Every week or so we had gatherings,

just a few friends.

Filmmakers, painters, poets.

♪ In the sunset over Manhattan Isle ♪

♪ Newark was my birthplace, under the wing for a while ♪

♪ Green gas tanks of Kearney, smog brown in the west ♪

♪ In the Lower East Side, I'll go take my rest ♪

♪ I'm alone in the sky where there's nothing to lose ♪

♪ The sun's not eternal, that's why there's the blues ♪

♪ Majestical jailhouse, our joys in the cage ♪

♪ Hearts full of hatred will outlast my old age ♪♪

There was always music in the house.

He had this group of Lithuanian friends,

people he arrived with,

and they would play these incredibly sad songs.

All Lithuanian folk songs are sad.

Every single one of 'em.

It appears to be... I mean, it was a good life.

It wasn't an idyllic life, but it was a good life.

I mean, the struggles were really real.

Like money.

And Anthology Film Archives, it was a huge struggle.

Come in! The Anthology Film Archives.

This is where I sit and work...

...on this fragile little table

to indicate the fragility of our existence

and fragility of film

that is falling to dust.

Every minute as we are talking, films are falling to dust.

The idea of the Anthology Film Archives

was that it'll establish a repertory of avant-garde,

independent, and classic cinema.

We have about 6,000 titles.

So that those who want to know more or less

what has been achieved in cinema as an art...

could have some idea

by seeing what we called essential cinema collection.

The film that we show quite often here...

Around 1970,

five of us discussed and argued

and prepared a list of essential cinema,

and we began screening them

on a repertory basis again and again,

and we thought that will be our function.

But that function changed soon because we discovered

if we screen, we have to get the best possible prints.

We discovered that the filmmaker died.

Nobody knows where the originals are,

or the originals are fading or shrinking

or are falling to pieces.

So we established the preservation department.

And we did this out of necessity,

not because we wanted to.

But there was this need. We had to do it.

I loved to come here and see if I could catch him

and go downstairs and talk to him

about new things in the archives.

And I remember things he'd tell me like, "Oh,

we found these Russian industrial films in the dumpster

that I now want to catalog."

Like this excitement of like, "What are they?"

"Oh, they're footage of strange machinery

and factories in the Soviet Union."

You know, these kind of things.

"And -- And we just found them. They've been thrown away.

So we're seeing should we include them in the archive,"

you know?

Film is fragile,

and -- and if you don't preserve it, it's gone.

It's history.

Every film is a kind of historical document

of that particular story, that particular time.

, Russian, American,

and the French, and the Germans.

Some of those films are ecstatically beautiful.

These are fragments of paradise,

and we have to do everything

to see that they don't disappear.

This kind of obsession or craziness keeps me alive.

He had such a pure vision of avant-garde film,

anthology, cinema.

But when he bought the courthouse in '79,

that was a really big leap.

For the Anthology Film Archive,

you are struggling with a financial campaign

to convert a magnificent building into a...

A courthouse building, uh, that has been closed

for the last ten years that we --

we acquired from the city.

And we will be transforming it into a film and video museum.

We are now in the 72-seat theater.

They were redoing the whole interior

when Saturday Night Live asked me,

"Would you make a five minute film?"

I asked Jonas if I could shoot here.

He said, "Yeah, You can shoot here.

I hope it's not disruptive that they'll be working around you,"

you know? Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too.

Get away.

It took ten years to get the courthouse

to the place where we could open it.

It took a lot of work.

Good morning, you! Good morning, Jonas.

How are you this morning?

Are we gonna make the countdown?

12 days before we open.

Five days before the opening.

Four days before the opening.

We'll be opening soon. I don't have the exact date.

Here comes the man who's in charge of this.

Two days before the opening.

Two hours before the show.

40 minutes before the opening.

Come in! The Anthology Film Archives.

Running Anthology was always a challenge.

The main headache is the fundraising.

Jonas knew a lot of people in the film world,

in the art world, that he could call on for help

when it was really needed, but it still wasn't easy.

Jonas used to call it a cathedral of cinema.

He used to say that they're angels,

that Anthology has a guardian angel.

I have at times found that to be true.

I have also at times

found that to be a very impractical answer

to the problems that we face.

Anthology was made by angels...

and miracles, luck, and hard work.

He worked in the day at Anthology.

He worked all the time.

Jonas worked more than any person I've ever known.

He described his day --

"I go to the Anthology in the morning, and then I go home

and I take care of the international correspondent.

I have time with my family,

and then I go

into the editing room after midnight,

and I stay in there as long as I can stay awake,

usually four hours."

It's five minutes to 2:00 in the morning.

The house is sleeping.

Yeah, when everyone else would go to bed,

he would -- he would go to this editing room.

He was always really productive.

But, I mean, I was definitely a backseat to the work.

I'm not sure that I am taping right now.

You see the light? Mm-hmm.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Is it really?

I noticed when I was around nine

that he got his first Sony video camera.

He was very excited by the possibilities of video,

the long takes...

and shooting synchronized sound for the first time.

I want here to hear.

Are you pressing? Yes.

And it says R-E-C? Yes.

Good. That means it's recording.

I can see the red light on it, so it's recording.

So I'm raising to your, uh, new book of poems,

which is right here.

Got that one wrong.

Does it record the sounds?

Of course! Um, I will read a poem.

"That tree said,

'I don't like that white car under me.

It smells gasoline.'"

"You are neurotic.

You can see by the way you are bent over.

You can see by the way..." "You're neurotic.

You can see by the way you're bent over."

"You can see..."

Here. "You are neurotic."

"You can see by the way you're bent over."

No, I'll read it to you. You take me.

Yeah. That's -- That's a better idea.

"That tree said, 'I don't like this white car under me.

It smells gasoline.'

That other tree next to it said,

'Ah, you're always complaining.

You're a neurotic. You can see by the way you're bent over.'"

Get it? This one...

You're not even listening!

Sebastian, you weren't giving me any attention at all.

I'm a guest here. I deserve attention.

I seem to be making an inventory of your apartment.

I don't suppose you've done this yet, have you?

No.

Well, this might be interesting.

Shall we enter the secret room?

It's of my mother,

holding my father and my mother when they just got married.

Mm-hmm.

There was a moment when filmmakers

really were not interested in working in video.

It has a different set of qualities.

It doesn't have that beauty of celluloid.

Jonas embraced it.

It was less about whether it was film versus video

as what were you trying to do with the medium.

While I might not find them aesthetically pleasing,

they are so brilliant in terms of portraiture.

Now I'm facing real disaster. He left.

Why? Why? So what happened?

Uh, the first -- This is the first night of...

He left me. He's out of love. He want to be independent.

Uh, I'm all shadowing.

I have too much energy.

I'm just too much. Not just for him, for everybody.

Generally, I'm too much, and I don't know how to be less.

Or maybe...

I'm always deeply emotionally touched

by his movies...

and I always discover beauty in it.

And you really never know where it takes you to next second,

because it's always -- every time you look at the movie,

you discover something new, something surprising

and something true.

Those years in the '80s, '90s,

he was doing so many things, balancing so many roles,

wearing many hats, riding different horses, as he'd say.

And he struggled at times to find time for his own work.

Jerry, maybe the only print actually is at the co-op,

so he have to borrow from the Film-Makers' Cooperative.

He weathered everything.

I mean, he could have utter chaos spinning around him

and he would weather it,

which was hard for the people around him.

'Cause chaos is really hard to deal with.

I mean, especially when it's constant.

Our whole life was so, like, just the film, Anthology...

And when you're married to someone

who's a little bit famous...

it's like you're an appendage.

I decided after 30 years of that...

...I need -- I just needed to be me, be free.

Somewhere around this time,

our protagonist's life...

collapsed.

Suddenly...

his life...

collapsed.

My parents were separated in the late '90s,

but they still lived in the same place,

just lived on opposite sides of the -- of The Loft.

We got divorced in 2001.

It wasn't until 2004 that we actually split

because neither of us had enough money

to strike out and get their own place.

We were like distant roommates.

I mean, we were -- we were polite.

It was disappointing and sad, but at the same time,

I knew that they would both be happier not living together.

The biggest devastation was getting rid of The Loft.

It's a lot of stuff to move.

I would say that was the lowest point of our relationship,

was moving, packing up all our stuff and moving out.

It was hard.

Do you like your cups like this?

Okay.

That looks interesting.

The Secret Strength of Depression.

I may need that one.

I have to admit, I feel...

lost.

I am lost again.

I have lost the sense why I'm here.

I'm lost.

I'm trying to find myself again.

This damned...

...questioning of myself all the time.

Ha!

Ha, ha, ha!

Here I am...

in this empty space...

impregnated with 30 years of life!

Every wall...

floor, ceiling...

space itself.

There must be...

a lot of little atoms of...

myself, Hollis, Sebastian, Oona,

attached to it, somewhere floating in the air...

...totally invisible.

A glimpse of my new home.

I would spend a lot of time with Jonas,

sometimes three nights a week.

Disappointed, Richard. Humanity.

He needed a friend, and I think he saw me

as he himself when he was my age, you know?

When you are an immigrant,

forever caught in that in-between space,

it's intense...

because you essentially don't have any home.

You never feel comfortable.

Anyone who knew him should have known

how deep the traumas of his early life were in him...

...and the degree to which

he refused to give into them...

and the degree to which he kept that invisible

and allowed it to come out in the films

only in the form of melancholy,

not in the form of the extremity of loss

and anger that I just saw

in every gesture and every facial movement.

You know, I mean,

you know how clowns are...

the most tragic figures?

Jonas worked very hard at being a clown for other people.

Here I am on February 6th.

Here is my room, my table, my glass of wine.

And here is me...

...by myself.

Here is my hand.

Here is my face...

my hair...

my heart.

Here is my heart. Somewhere there.

Here I am.

Me, me.

Where is me?

What is me?

What was my life all about?

Do I still have time

to do something about my life?

I really don't know.

God...

angels, help me.

I have no--

nobody but this camera.

This camera!

This camera --

I threw it on the floor.

I picked it up, and it still works.

This piece of metal here in front of me is my only friend.

So here I am.

I'm not -- I don't know what to do.

I don't know what to do.

I don't know why I'm taping this,

but...I'm taping it.

That's my...life.

It's...2:10...

after midnight.

I can't sleep.

Ah, the music, it, uh...

I can't sleep. I can't sleep.

I can't sleep,

and the music is helping me to.

One of the ways my father dealt with

the ending of that part of his life was to make

As I was Moving Ahead, I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.

When I began now...

to put all these...

rolls of film together...

and just put them together by chance,

the way that I found them on the shelf...

...because I really don't know

where any piece of my life really belongs.

Yeah, this is one of my favorite films to watch.

This goes back to what he was doing in 16 millimeter.

Walden, his Diaries, Notes and Sketches,

and they're all sort of stitched together.

My filmmaking saves me.

It saves me, I don't know what I would do.

Sunlight, some sun in my life.

There are moments that I fall into...

those kinds of moods.

Moments that don't last very long,

but I'm very miserable when those moments come.

But I'm out of it.

Out of it.

Hey, what are you doing there?

Get off!

You're going somewhere...

and yet you're going nowhere.

That symbolizes our own human minds

when we think we are going somewhere,

but we are going nowhere.

He was very sad about

parting ways with, you know, Hollis,

but what came out is a 365-day project,

which is about celebration of life

for that one year.

365-day project.

That was one of the most challenging.

I mean, I made a film every day,

a film between five to ten minutes long.

Came to 38 hours of finished film,

which is no joke.

It's one of his greatest creation of the late years.

I'm not going to do the dishes tomorrow.

Should I leave this just as an empty day?

...under which St. Mary appeared...

December 23, 2007.

It's a very special night

because it's an alignment of planets --

nine, I believe -- and the winter solstice

that we're just kind of coming out of,

and a full moon.

And, um, and your birthday.

That was a time also

when my father started to get very interested

and very busy with exhibitions

and showing his work in new ways.

Sound coming from different installations.

It was all very exciting.

Jonas blossomed.

He was celebrated all over the world.

I don't know whether that would've happened

if we had stayed together.

I'm writing a book about you for my PhD.

It's all about the life work of Jonas Mekas.

Sorry you had to do so much work.

He recreated a new Jonas.

Never before you have encountered an artist

with that incredible new-discovered energy.

The pain created this titanic energy.

Profound tragedy in life, also energy.

It depends how you turn that into energy.

This is like a new premier

of Jonas Mekas as a personality.

More and more Jonas films came into gallery and museums,

and the format of presenting them in the gallery,

it had to be invented because some of these films

are very long, some of them are quite short.

He was a curator himself

who knew how to construct a narrative

not only in a piece of poetry or a film,

but also in a film program, you know, in a festival.

I dunno if we would have independent cinema

if it wasn't for Jonas Mekas.

Deeply honored to present Jonas Mekas

with his lifetime achievement award.

When you think about the artist in late years,

is about the incredible last breath of mortality,

and I think Jonas knew that it was fleeting.

I've referred to him as being

a kind of poetic equivalent of a kung-fu master.

And I want to talk with Jonas about this,

that maybe the secret of the universe is

don't go against the grain.

Learn how things flow, and you don't have to hit against them.

The flow of energy and of life and of expression,

ideas, is something very mysterious and magical.

Jonas created this sort of new art,

which is more than film --

the art of being in a creative joy.

Sebastian had lived with him...

the last...

I dunno, eight years.

He -- He worked with him, he traveled with him.

He took care of him when he was sick.

That was so beautiful.

My father was getting older,

and it was also nice -- I mean, I found sort of

a new relationship with my father,

very different from when I was a teenager.

So we certainly became even closer and more like friends.

We would travel together and go dancing.

My father, I guess I told him that I was pregnant

and he didn't really -- like, he wasn't boisterous about it,

but he was very happy,

and I'm just glad that he got to meet her.

Oh, oh, look.

She can play!

Very good. More, more, more.

Yeah. Do it.

She knows you're filming,

so she doesn't wanna do it anymore.

Okay. Then I'm not going to film.

Okay.

He was uniquely fit

for catching people in their moments.

It's all little daily scenes...

personal, little celebrations,

joys and miracles.

The little moments of paradise that are here now.

Next moment, maybe they're gone.

I didn't get to go through all of those yet.

I think there's one... I'm almost done.

I'm missing one box of Christmas decorations

that I can see. Oh, I -- I know where they are.

Let me label really quickly what...

And put it there...

...whatever you want to take.

Oh! My comic books.

You found my comic books!

I've been looking for these

since you moved out of The Loft.

It's a beautiful thing

to be able to see your family life

through somebody else's eyes.

And not everybody gets that,

so I'm super grateful.

Oh, Oona. Let the images run.

Let the images run.

Very little of what you see...

...you remember.

He talks about those fragments of paradise,

and... it's how I live my life.

Like, no matter how bad stuff is,

you can always find...

just a little fragment.

And that's what the diary film is.

It's like...

sharing these intimate...

things from his heart and his soul

and the poetry.

It's the poetry in film.

I did it.

I managed to catch

some of the beauty,

some of the happiness.

That's all I care...

to catch...

some of the beauty...

...around.

And it's there.

It's there.

I did it.

And I'm happy.