Jonas Mekas
Scrapbook of the Sixties Writings : 1958 – 2010
Author(s) Jonas Mekas
Artist(s) Jonas Mekas, Anne König, Fabian Bremer, Pascal Storz
Format sewn softcover book
Year 2019
Language(s) English
Pages 456 pages
Description
Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Jonas Mekas knew a great many New York artists. Born in Lithuania, he arrived in Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began shooting his first experimental films there. Mekas developed a form of film diary in which he recorded his daily observations. He became the barometer of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Starting in 1958, he published his famous "Movie Journal" column weekly in the Village Voice, in which he wrote about a wide variety of subjects, by no means limited to cinema. He conducted numerous interviews with artists, some of which appear for the first time in his "Scrapbook of a Sixties." The book gathers published and unpublished texts that reveal Mekas as a thoughtful diarist and an incomparable chronicler of his time — a phenomenon that has continued for over fifty years.