February 26, 2018
Film

By: Jonathan Shia
Photography by: Mario Sorrenti

Photographer’s assistants: So Yoshimura and Kotaro Kawashima. Lighting by Lars Beaulieu. Set design by Philipp Haemmerle. Set designer’s assistant: Ryan Stenger. Digital technicians: Kotaro Kawashima and Chad Meyer. Casting by The Last Universe. Production by Katie Fash and Steve Sutton. Printing by Arc Lab Ltd.

NEW YORK BY THE LAST MAGAZINE: FILMMAKER JONAS MEKAS IS INSPIRED BY ANGELS

In 1949, the Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas escaped to New York courtesy of the United Nations Refugee Agency from Germany, where he had also spent eight months in a labor camp during World War II. He came to the city, he says, not by his own choice, but he has remained here ever since, first settling in Williamsburg and soon buying the Bolex 16mm camera with which he would begin to create the avant-garde films that first made his name, beginning with Guns of the Trees in 1962. “I was brought to New York at a very good time, when everything that was old, all the classical forms and all of the arts and styles of living, had come to an end and new winds were blowing in every area,” he recalls, citing creative revolutionaries like John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, and Yvonne Rainer who made Fifties New York one of the most inventive cultural scenes in history.

Mekas launched the magazine Film Culture with his brother Adolfas in 1954 and soon became known for his film curation, founding the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and then the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, which eventually evolved into Anthology Film Archives, the East Village theater that continues to present a rich legacy of avant-garde movies to this day. Mekas’s own films have tended toward the experimental, but his own taste as a viewer and curator is vigorously catholic, ranging from silent masterpieces to mid-century studio classics to the latest provocations. (Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird is a recent favorite.) “It has to be intense,” he says when asked what draws him to a film. “It must be something that I want to see many times and, the more times you see it, you keep discovering different things.”

Now ninety-five, Mekas continues to live his life with the same passion for exploration. Over the course of 2007, he released a film a day as part of his 365 Day Project, drawing on his own penchant for recording his everyday activities in his earlier “diary films” decades before the advent of Instagram. He continues to run Anthology Film Archives and is currently overseeing a twelve-million-dollar expansion to add another floor for a film library to provide inspiration to aspiring filmmakers. “I keep saying muses come into you when you are a child, at your birth when you cannot defend yourself, and you have to do what they want you to do,” he offers about his continued dedication to his art even as he nears the century mark. “You want to sing or dance or write poetry or make movies. You have no choice. I don’t say I’m possessed, but I would say angels make me do it.”

Pick up our tenth-anniversary issue to see the entire portfolio of notable New Yorkers photographed by Mario Sorrenti and styled by George Cortina here.

By: Jonathan Shia
Photography by: Mario Sorrenti

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