Jonas Mekas

Famously known as the man that "inspired Andy Warhol to make films" and the "godfather of avant-garde cinema" who filmed John and Yoko's "bed-in" and set up the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. Mekas films congure a sense of memory, story telling and seem biographical.

Maverick film-maker Harmony Korine summed up his singular spirit: "Jonas is a true hero of the underground and a radical of the first degree – a shape-shifter and time-fucker… he sees things that others can't… his cinema is a cinema of memory and soul and air and fire. There is no one else like him. His films will live forever."

Mekas has lived an incredibly tortured and beautiful life. As a young person he was imprisoned in a labor camp in Hamburg for eight months, before living in a displaced persons camp for several years, after which he immegrated to Williamsburg, NY. During his first two weeks in America he borrowed money to purchase a 16mm camera and by 1950 he began screening his own films at Gallery East on Avenue A and Houston Street, and a Film Forum series at Carl Fisher Auditorium on 57th Street. Soon after he became the editor of Film Culture and a writer for the film section of Village Voice. Mekas is also a well-known Lithuanian language poet and has published many of his poems and prose in both Lithuanian and English. To read more about his life visit his Wiki page.