DEEP BALTIC MAGAZINE
Feb 11, 2019
Jonas Mekas’s cinematic work is a jumble of film, with emphasis on the visual poetry of the captured moment as much as the sound. His camera participates, questions, intertwines, untangles, cuts, explores, turns on itself, dances and most importantly archives; it sketches out the face of an entire generation, as varied as Andy Warhol, who became the central figure of the New York pop-art movement; the first lady, Jackie Kennedy; the pioneering performance artist Yoko Ono; the filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer, of whom Jonas Mekas made a film portrait in 1965; and the surrealist painter and filmmaker Salvador Dalí, who came from Spain especially because he felt “something seemed to be happening in New York,” and Dalí wanted to be part of it. Together in 1963-64 they made a series of happenings, which Mekas made into a short film called Salvador Dalí at Work. Mekas also made a silent film with Andy Warhol called Empire. Revisiting rolls of footage, Mekas later made films about many of the people and places that had been a part of his earlier life. This Side of Paradise, which is about the summers that Mekas spent with the Kennedy family, was completed in 1999. ...
ART LAW JOURNAL