In April 1972, Jonas Mekas stopped by Jackie Kennedy. He wants to know how the family is doing, “film-wise”. And sure enough, Jackie, Caroline and John Jr. always have the Super 8 camera that Mekas got them with them. The children even just shot a 3-minute film. Title: “The First Shave”. The Kennedys’ cook plays the axe-wielding barber, and John Jr. and Caroline argue over whose film it is, John’s, who wrote the “screenplay” and is directing as a lathered 12-year-old lead, or Caroline’s, who operating the camera. Mekas doesn’t care, he’s happy about this real “author’s” film.
Born in a Lithuanian village in 1922, Mekas is considered the godfather of New York and thus of American avant-garde film. After being a German prisoner of war and years in various displaced person camps, he came to New York in 1949 and founded the magazine film culturewrote a film column for the for decades Village Voice and in the early 1960s created the “Film-makers’ Cooperative”, the central place for American film art. Here he made Andy Warhol with the band The Velvet Underground known, here Robert Frank and Yoko Ono gave each other a hand. Frank made it possible for Mekas to stay in the USA with an employment contract.
Glamor didn’t interest Mekas in the slightest, however. He was only interested in art. Just as people in American cities, he writes in his diary, often take up arms in self-defense, he grabs a film camera and “shoots” his pictures: “To keep me from being crushed by the desolation of the present” (” To protect myself from being crushed by the bleakness of the reality around me”).
Jonas Mekas: I seem to live. The New York Diaries Vol. 1, 1950-1969. Spector Books, Leipzig 2019. 824 pages, 38 euros. Vol. 2, 1969-2011. Spector Books, Leipzig 2021. 736 pages, 38 euros.
Art is the only thing that counts, Mekas sacrifices his last cent for art. Like hardly any other book, his diaries bear witness to this absoluteness. It’s always about raising money, money for the magazine, money for film material, money for the rent. As a result, Mekas and his brother Adolfas are literally starving, eating nothing but beans for weeks, and at some point they can no longer afford even those.
With all the seriousness that the trade of art requires, with all the obstacles that life throws in an artist’s way, and with all the melancholy that Mekas is either born with or that has settled in him through the loss of his beloved homeland – he will only see his mother again after 27 years – his diaries testify to an unbelievably life-affirming vitality. New York offers him a freedom and a social environment that would not have existed anywhere else in the world.
Since Mekas is unfamiliar with any strict regulations, the diaries do not follow a day-by-day scheme, but instead collect lists, anecdotes, pamphlets, letters, conversations and repeated thoughts about filmmaking. Like a colorful album, they also collect photographs, film stills, manuscripts, tickets, postcards, bank statements, drawings or even a telegram from the Fluxus pioneer George Maciunas, his Lithuanian compatriot and friend: “God is an infant devil is an infant eat baby groceries.”
The diary as a collection of material: excerpt from Jonas Mekas’ “New York Diaries”.
(Photo: Spector Books)
Before Jonas Mekas died in 2019, he had scanned and organized all the material for the volumes of his diaries that are now available. There is practically nothing personal in it that is not related to the work, no meticulous descriptions of emotional upheavals, no wallowing in fleeting feelings.
Mekas doesn’t say a word about his first visit to his Lithuanian homeland in 1971, we only see a photo in which he pans across the meadow in front of his mother’s house with a hand-held camera. Just as moving as this photo is, precisely because of its objectivity, a report on the death of Allen Ginsberg and the photographically documented wake. One learns about the daughter’s birth indirectly through a letter that Mekas’ mother sends from Lithuania.
Unlike Mekas’ first diary, “I had no place,” which mainly covers his time in the displaced person camps in Kassel and Wiesbaden, Spector Verlag did not have the two volumes of “I seem to live” translated . But even someone who reads only moderately good English will have no problems following the sentences of the language changer Mekas, what’s more, precisely in Mekas’ simple, unpretentious language gesture there is a special charm that can probably only be understood in the original. For the filmmaker, language is above all a tool. However, the poet, who was also Mekas, could not help but charge every word with wit and poetic energy: “I am worried that you may take/ this for a poem,/ while it’s only a diary/ entry/ I am worried. “