Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas

Author: Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1496829239

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A refugee from post–World War II Europe who immigrated to the US in 1949, Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) became one of America's foremost champions of independent cinema and one of its most innovative filmmakers. An admired poet in his native Lithuania, Mekas began recording his life on film shortly after his arrival in New York. Through his work as the author of the Village Voice’s “Movie Journal” column, editor of Film Culture magazine, and founder of Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Mekas played a vital role in the promotion of avant-garde and independent films. His early films, Guns of the Trees and The Brig, challenged the structure of traditional narrative filmmaking. He is best known for his “diary films,” including Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches); Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania; and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. His films, writings, and the institutions he built have influenced generations of filmmakers, poets, artists, musicians, critics, and scholars. In Jonas Mekas: Interviews, volume editor Gregory R. Smulewicz-Zucker collects eighteen interviews covering almost sixty years of the filmmaker’s career. Mekas discusses his remarkable life as a refugee from Nazi- and Soviet-occupied Lithuania, his role as one of the major figures in the development of the American avant-garde, and his thoughts about his own work. In conversation with scholars, journalists, and other prominent artists, Mekas speaks of his passion for artistic expression and uncompromising vision for a liberated cinema. These interviews preserve Mekas’s voice so that it might speak to future generations of artists and intellectuals.


I Had Nowhere to Go

I Had Nowhere to Go

Author: Jonas Mekas

Publisher:

Published: 2017-04

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 9783959051460

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Jonas Mekas has worked together with Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon, and many others. In New York he was an influential figure in the New American Cinema, although he came to film-making relatively late. In 1944 Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee from the Nazis for copying leaflets. They were interned for eight months in a labour camp in Elmshorn. The Soviet occupation prevented him from returning to his native Lithuania after the war and, classed as a ?displaced person?, he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. Towards the end of 1949 he and his brother emigrated to New York. In his autobiography 'I Had Nowhere to Go' he describes his survival in the camps and his arrival in New York. Mekas tells a universal story, that of an émigré who can never go back, whose loneliness in his new world is emblematic of human existence.


Adventures of Perception

Adventures of Perception

Author: Scott MacDonald

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2009-08-25

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0520258568

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"Over the past twenty-five years, Scott MacDonald's kaleidoscopic explorations of independent cinema have become the most important chronicle of avant-garde and experimental film in the United States. In this collection of thematically related personal essays and conversations with filmmakers, he takes us on a fascinating journey into many under-explored territories of cinema. MacDonald illuminates topics including race and avant-garde film, the political implications of the nature film, the inventive single shot films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, why men use pornography and what they are looking at when they do, poetry and the poetic in avant-garde film, the widespread failure of film studies academicians to honor those who keep film exhibition alive, and other topics. Several of the interviews--those with Korean filmmaker Gina Kim, French nature filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou (Microcosmos), Canadian media artist Clive Holden, formalist/conceptualist David Gatten, and New York's Film Forum director Karen Cooper--are the first substantial conversations with these filmmakers available in English."--Publisher's description.


Evolution of Desire

Evolution of Desire

Author: Cynthia L Haven

Publisher: MSU Press

Published: 2018-04-01

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 1628953306

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René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the leading thinkers of our era—a provocative sage who bypassed prevailing orthodoxies to offer a bold, sweeping vision of human nature, human history, and human destiny. His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.


An Accented Cinema

An Accented Cinema

Author: Hamid Naficy

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0691186219

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In An Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy offers an engaging overview of an important trend--the filmmaking of postcolonial, Third World, and other displaced individuals living in the West. How their personal experiences of exile or diaspora translate into cinema is a key focus of Naficy's work. Although the experience of expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, the films themselves exhibit stylistic similarities, from their open- and closed-form aesthetics to their nostalgic and memory-driven multilingual narratives, and from their emphasis on political agency to their concern with identity and transgression of identity. The author explores such features while considering the specific histories of individuals and groups that engender divergent experiences, institutions, and modes of cultural production and consumption. Treating creativity as a social practice, he demonstrates that the films are in dialogue not only with the home and host societies but also with audiences, many of whom are also situated astride cultures and whose desires and fears the filmmakers wish to express. Comparing these films to Hollywood films, Naficy calls them "accented." Their accent results from the displacement of the filmmakers, their alternative production modes, and their style. Accented cinema is an emerging genre, one that requires new sets of viewing skills on the part of audiences. Its significance continues to grow in terms of output, stylistic variety, cultural diversity, and social impact. This book offers the first comprehensive and global coverage of this genre while presenting a framework in which to understand its intricacies.


Baltic States

Baltic States

Author: Jonathan Bousfield

Publisher: Rough Guides

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9781858288406

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"The tough guide to the baltic states is an indispensable guide to this intriguing part to Europe"--Back cover


I Seem to Live

I Seem to Live

Author: Jonas Mekas

Publisher:

Published: 2021-11

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783959052900

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"I seem to live: the New York diaries, 1950-2011 is Jonas Mekas's key literary work. The first volume of this magnum opus, covering the period from 1950-1969, appears posthumously in the year of his death. It stands on an equal fooing with his cinematic oeuvre, which he initially developed together with his brother Adolfas after their arrival in New York. In 1954, the two brothers founded Film Culture magazine, and a weekly column for The Village Voice. It was in this period that his writing, films, and unflagging commitment to art began to establish him as a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema and the barometer of the New York art scene. An assemblage of Jonas's diaries from this exciting period, enriched with his own personal visual material, I seem to live: the New York diaries, vol. 1, 1950-1969 reads as a moving and subjectively condensed chronology of the postwar New York underground scene, which he shaped and defended through his writings"--Page 4 of cover


Happiness Is a Choice You Make

Happiness Is a Choice You Make

Author: John Leland

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books

Published: 2018-01-23

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0374717052

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A New York Times Bestseller! An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.