Adolfas Mekas

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.

Also known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.

Barbara, a young woman consumed by despair, contemplates suicide, while a man she meets in a church and a married couple struggle to persuade her that life is still worth living. Mekas’s film weaves this intimate drama into a larger reflection on alienation, politics, and the turbulence of early 1960s America.

Heretic is composed from the outtakes of Joe Gibbons's no-budget feature The Genius, set to John Zorn's Naked City "soundtrack" album Heretic, and recomposed as a satire on Psychotherapy. Features original narration performed by Frank Snider. A study of editing and its relation to the mechanics of the brain, HERETIC initially poses as a preview to the Gibbons film which it then deconstructs and reforms into a satire on psychotherapy.

Unable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.

Drawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.

Biker Click procures lovely willing young women for decadent millionaire playboy Kendall Harvey III. Kendall sets his sights on Peggy Johns as his next conquest, but the married and straight-laced Peggy turns down his proposal. However, after her husband's advertising business finds itself in a financial slump, Kendall offers to help out but only if Peggy agrees to be his intimate companion for two days.

Jack and Leo vie for the affections of Vera – who appears a little differently to each man – over the course of a series of energetic sketches, flashbacks and homages.

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.

Interesting and sometimes funny adaptation of a Mark Twain short story. Hatfield is a carpetbagger who marries the daughter of a prominent plantation owner in order to humiliate him. He mistreats his wife, but she stoically refuses to complain to her father.

Jonas Mekas weaves an elegiac diary film from his 1971–72 return to Lithuania, chronicling a visit to his birthplace of Semeniškiai after decades in exile. Blending personal memory with documentary observation, the film becomes both a portrait of homecoming and a meditation on displacement, family, and the passage of time.

A fable about an old man with an odd effect on those he encounters.

An Adolfas Mekas directed short parodying Italian art films of the time. It was created for use in a scene of the Broadway musical, "Skyscraper," starring Julie Harris and Peter Marshall, with a book by Peter Stone, music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn.

An attractive youth counselor must resort to murder in order to be free from her sordid past.

Arthouse portraiture of a disestablishmentarian during his six-year draft dodge.

Jonas Mekas’s film captures The Living Theatre’s stage production of The Brig, an unflinching portrait of life inside a U.S. Marine Corps jail in Japan in 1957. Over the course of a single day, prisoners endure relentless drills, abuse, and dehumanization, exposing the brutality of military discipline with stark immediacy.