Jonas Mekas tells me he’s 27 years old. Strictly speaking, he’s 95, but the avant garde film-maker, poet, critic and philosopher decided 68 years ago that he was sticking at 27. “After 27, people begin to become old, according to Melville,” he says. “They look back and repeat. After 27, you begin to think, ‘Is this the right way to do it?’ You think twice. Before that, you say, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care. I just do it.’”
Is he still in his “Fuck you” period? “Yes I am. When I came to New York I was 27. I was very angry about what I had lost before 27. I always blamed the ‘civilisation’ that threw me out of my home.” Mekas still has a thick European accent. He grew up in a small village in northern Lithuania called Semeniškiai – he calls it a paradise “where nothing happened then suddenly everything happened”.
He lost paradise when the Soviets invaded in 1940. That is when he took his first photograph, aged 17. A soldier snatched his camera and confiscated the film. A year later, the Germans invaded. Mekas joined the resistance, typing out news bulletins sourced from BBC broadcasts and distributing them clandestinely. One day, his typewriter went missing and he feared he’d been found out.
He and his brother Adolfus fled Lithuania in 1944, but were stopped on a train in Germany and imprisoned in a Nazi labour camp in Hamburg for eight months. The brothers escaped but were caught and kept until 1946 in displaced persons’ camps. Eventually, they emigrated to America, settling in Brooklyn, New York. There, Mekas borrowed money and bought his first Bolex 16mm movie camera. His film-making days had begun.
But they weren’t conventional films. Mekas eschewed narrative and plot. He didn’t have time for the artifice of Hollywood. Why did every scene have to connect to every other from start to finish? And yet there was something traditional in his film-making. He was always interested in capturing those magical moments that make up a life, moments at once prosaic and transcendent. His films often look like home movies – Proustian scraps of memories, children smiling, a day at the seaside, revisiting Lithuania, home cooking, walking through New York. Sometimes footage is speeded up so it becomes dizzying, sometimes it’s slowed down. The camera rarely stops: one continuous shot and that’s that.
Lost, Lost, Lost – made in 1976 – is a gorgeous three-hour memoir about the move from Lithuania to New York. The film conveys his loss, loneliness, bewilderment – and ultimately his sense of rapture at his new homeland. It is composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of disconnected images, accompanied by Mekas in a voiceover that is both lyrical and stumbling staccato: “I was there with my camera to record conflicting passions. I was there, the chronicler, the diarist. I recorded it all. And I don’t know – am I singing or am I crying?”
It is more prose-poem than conventional voiceover and, as with all his work, it is accompanied by an incredibly diverse soundtrack, ranging from Lithuanian folk to Jewish prayer, Billie Holiday to avant-garde jazz. Much of the music was taken straight from the radio. Occasionally, Mekas employed actors. His adaptation of the Kenneth H Brown play The Brig, a brutal depiction of life in a Marine Corps jail, was so realistic it won first prize in the documentary section of the 1964 Venice film festival.
We meet at the hotel where he is staying, near Bloomsbury in the heart of literary London. Mekas suggests we sit at a table at the back of the lounge, where it is quiet. His son Sebastian, with whom he lives, walks over and says he has been told this table is reserved for management meetings. But Mekas isn’t having any of it. He has spent a lifetime pushing back at authority. “I don’t think we should go,” he says firmly. “The manager should be happy we are sitting here.”
Mekas could almost pass as a painter-decorator. He is wearing his trademark blue cotton jacket splodged with white paint, paired with a flat cap. His face is dotted with liver spots and when he smiles – which he does a lot – his blue eyes narrow to slits. He is as busy as ever. He has come to Britain to promote a book of his conversations with film-makers, but is already talking about his next project, an anthology of his diaries. And he’s as contrary as ever. Asked what attracted him to the avant garde, he takes issue with the term. “There is nothing avant garde about what I have done and what I am doing.” He simply says he has spent his life doing what had to be done.
By the time Mekas got to America in 1949, he was not interested in filming anything dark or bleak. He had already witnessed too much hell. He wanted to film the stuff that made life worth living. In 1954, he and Adolfus founded Film Culture, a magazine that explored underground cinema. By 1958, Mekas was writing a film column for the Village Voice. In the early 1960s, he co-founded what eventually became Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest repositories of avant-garde film.
Perhaps most importantly, he opened up his loft to friends and fellow travellers in the avant garde. Here, any number of legendary – or soon to be legendary – artists met to watch endless films in which nothing happened, while discussing cultural possibilities. These included Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Salvador Dalí, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs. (Although he was firmly rooted in the counterculture, he had many establishment friends. Mekas taught the children of John and Jackie Kennedy to make films.)
It was at Mekas’s apartment that Warhol first became interested in film-making. “In my loft,” he says, “Andy met film-makers and was inspired by them. That’s where he got the bug. My loft was a gathering space for musicians, poets, film-makers.” Mekas helped Warhol shoot Empire, an eight-hour, slow-motion film of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. He has little time for those who regard Warhol as merely a self-publicist. He didn’t seek out fame, says Mekas – it was the other way round.
“The newspapers began to attack him and it created a kind of fame. Then the society around him began to seek him out. Then everybody began to write and say, ‘Andy is only interested in those fake people, he only wants fame.’ But it was the reverse . He was never interested in them and, the more he ignored them, the more they flocked to him. Everybody could go into the Factory – and lost souls would come in because he never said no. Whatever they said, he acted like a good father. He just never said no.”
When Lennon and Ono moved to New York in 1976, the first person they called, in the middle of the night, was Mekas – to ask where they could get a decent espresso. He says Lennon was like Warhol. “He was very open and so quick. He could improvise on the spot.”
He regards Yoko Ono’s early conceptual work as “unsurpassable” and he worked, or played, with Dalí. ‘“He should have been an actor. He was one of the earliest performing artists. He did everything with a sense of surprise. He would always create situations of surprise and magic. He’d tell you that life is like an apple then put his hand in his pocket and pull one out to illustrate the point.”
Although Mekas has devoted his life to film, he once famously said: “Shoot all scriptwriters and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.” As far as he was concerned, scriptwriters were the enemy of spontaneity, the authors of control. Mekas championed such brilliant film-makers as Roberto Rossellini in Italy and John Cassavetes in the US, who made movies that looked as if they were sticking their camera in front of reality and letting it roll.
His book of interviews with film-makers makes for remarkable reading. At times, he sounds like a headmaster calling pupils into his office to reprimand them for selling out or having one eye on the Hollywood leviathan. He more or less tells Susan Sontag she should stick to writing, accuses Agnès Varda of making an “escapist” film that sides with with “capitalistic cinema”, and asks Robert Downey senior: “Why do you have to resort to vulgarity?”
Mekas smiles when I mention the interviews. He says he might have been critical, but he never interviewed anybody he did not admire. Nor did he always enjoy speaking his mind. “It was not easy for me to tell Susan Sontag that, particularly knowing how much she thought of herself as a film-maker. But we were friends and remained friends.”
Mekas also championed the taboo. In 1964, he was charged for violating obscenity laws after screening Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the Bowery theatre in New York. The film, and the case, became a cause célèbre. Mekas and two others were found guilty of showing an obscene motion picture and given a suspended sentence. In recent years, he says, his taste has become a little more conservative: “I read very little that was not written before the 13th century.”
When push comes to shove, he prefers going back to the third century and Saint Jerome, when society was more in touch with the the spiritual. Everything these days, he says, is about industry and productivity. “I’m now trying to get back what the civilisation took away from humanity. St Jerome was one of the most educated people of the time. He translated the Bible into Latin and taught a balance between the spiritual and the earthly needs of the community. We have lost the balance today. Technology is far ahead of humanity and ethics.”
In other ways, his views are little changed. When I ask which recent films he has liked, he cites Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. “It is the only one that deals with real life and succeeds – and they ignored it at the Oscars. It was ignored because it was good, because it was intelligent, made by a woman. If that kind of a film was made by a man, it would just repeat what we always think about young women between 15 and 20. Every line was fresh.”
Best of all, he says, it had no plot. “Usually, movies are full of cliches. This was based on situations, one not connected with the next. It’s not about what is happening but about what her state is. The film consists of 120 or so situations. It’s a collage.” Which is pretty much Mekas’s definition of what a film should be. Yet even here he throws me a curveball. “The best commercial cinema today is action cinema. The plots are invented on the spot. Not like Hitchcock, where every scene that follows is connected with the final scene. In the action movie, it is more like the style of The Arabian Nights.” It’s impossible to know if he is making an ideological point, amusing himself, or whether he actually means it.
Mekas still gets his camera out every day. What delights him is the fact that technology has democratised film and helped to bring his vision of DIY non-narrative movies to fruition. “Cocteau wrote that cinema will become a mature art when you are able to use your camera like your pen, and that’s where we are.” He whips out a pen from his jacket pocket – and then his tiny digital camera, conjuror-like, just like Dalí would have done. “I have a pen and I have a camera,” he says. “New technology allows me to go into different areas of content that I couldn’t go into with my traditional camera.”
Mekas is an impish nonagenarian. His hearing is perfect, he is not wearing glasses and he looks supremely fit. What’s his secret? “The secret of my health is to lead a normal life. Ninety-five is normal. Just don’t overdo anything. If you live normally, then it’s normal to be OK at 95, but people usually overdo things – too much sex, too much worry, too much work, too much food, too much drinking too much smoking, is no good. I do it all. But to a degree.”
And with that lesson in moderation, the godfather of the avant garde heads off to Bloomsbury to find a decent bar.
• Conversations with Film-Makers by Jonas Mekas is published by Spector Books
