Jonas Mekas (;"Jim Jarmusch Interview: How Jonas Mekas Expanded the Possibilities of Film" ; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian (fled the Soviet Regime) filmmaker, poet, and artistMarie Sophie Beckmann, Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of Transgression, Rutgers University Press, 2026, pp.32, 53-55, 111 who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas's work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide. Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers' Cooperative, and the journal Film Culture. He was also the first film critic for The Village Voice.
In the 1960s, Mekas launched anti-censorship campaigns in defense of the LGBTQ-themed films of Jean Genet and Jack Smith, garnering support from cultural figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag. Mekas mentored and supported many prominent artists and filmmakers, including Ken Jacobs, Peter Bogdanovich, Chantal Akerman, Richard Foreman, John Waters, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono, and Martin Scorsese. He helped launch the writing careers of the critics Andrew Sarris, Amy Taubin, and J. Hoberman.
During World War II, Mekas edited and contributed to two far-right, collaborationist newspapers under the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, the significance of which has been debated by historians.
His major films include The Brig (1964), Walden: Diaries Notes and Sketches (1968), and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). His early poetry collection Idylls of Semeniskiai (1948) is a celebrated work in his native Lithuania.
In 2024, the Centre Pompidou dedicated its annual Poetry Day to Mekas, following past editions honoring figures such as Patti Smith and John Giorno. The event, which included readings, screenings, and performances celebrating his literary and cinematic legacy, was held across multiple cities, including Paris, Lviv, Seoul, Los Angeles, Vilnius, and Tehran.
Early life Mekas was born in Semeniškiai, the son of Elzbieta (Jašinskaitė) and Povilas Mekas on December 24, 1922.Mekas' passport shows December 23, 1922, the date sometimes listed as his "official" date of birth; however, he was actually born on December 24, 1922, as he confirms in this video interview . As a teenager, he attended the Biržai Gymnasium in Biržai, Lithuania. From 1941 to 1942, living under Nazi occupation, he co-edited and published in the culture section of Naujosios Biržų žinios, founded by the far-right, anti-semitic Lithuanian Activist Front. From 1943 to 1944, he co-edited and published in the culture section of Panevėžio apygardos balsas, a weekly local newspaper published by the fascist Lithuanian Nationalist Party.
In 1944, Mekas left Lithuania with his brother, Adolfas Mekas. They attempted to reach neutral Switzerland by means of Vienna, with fabricated student papers arranged by their uncle. Their train was stopped in Germany, and they were both imprisoned in a labor camp in Elmshorn, a suburb of Hamburg, for eight months. The brothers escaped and hid on a farm near the Danish border for two months until the end of the war. After the war, Mekas lived in displaced persons' camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. From 1946 to 1948, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz. By the end of 1949 his brother and he had both secured sponsorship through a job in Chicago and emigrated to the United States. When they arrived, the two decided to settle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed money to buy his first Bolex 16mm camera and began recording moments of his life.
He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel's pioneering Cinema 16, and he began curating avant-garde film screenings at Gallery East on Avenue A and Houston Street and at the Film Forum series at Carl Fisher Auditorium on 57th Street.
Career In 1954, Mekas and his brother Adolfas founded the journal Film Culture, and in 1958 he began writing his "Movie Journal" column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative, and in 1964 the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, which eventually became Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Along with Lionel Rogosin, he was part of the New American Cinema movement. He was a close collaborator with artists such as Marie Menken, Andy Warhol, Nico, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Salvador Dalí, and fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas.
After leaving The Voice over an editorial dispute, for a short time he wrote a column for The SoHo Weekly News.
Mekas gave the film Heaven and Earth Magic its title in 1964/65.
In 1964, Mekas was arrested on obscenity charges for showing Flaming Creatures (1963) and Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950). He launched a campaign against the censorship board, and for the next few years continued to exhibit films at the Filmmakers' Cinematheque, the Jewish Museum, and the Gallery of Modern Art. From 1964 to 1967, he organized the New American Cinema Expositions, which toured Europe and South America. In 1966, Mekas joined the Fluxhouse Cooperative, a group of residences and art studios begun by his fellow Lithuanian George Maciunas. Consisting of at least several buildings, the co-op is sometimes credited in the history of Manhattan's then-derelict Soho neighborhood.
In 1970, Anthology Film Archives opened on 425 Lafayette Street as a film museum, screening space, and library, with Mekas as its director. Mekas, along with Stan Brakhage, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, James Broughton, and P. Adams Sitney, began the ambitious Essential Cinema project at Anthology Film Archives to establish a canon of important cinematic works. Mekas's legs appeared in John Lennon and Yoko Ono's experimental film Up Your Legs Forever (1971).
As a filmmaker, Mekas's own output ranged from his early narrative film Guns of the Trees (1961) to "diary films" such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost (1975), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), Zefiro Torna (1992), and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), which have been screened at festivals and museums around the world. Mekas' diary films offered a new perspective to the genre and portrayed the cinematic avant-garde scene of the 1960s.
Mekas expanded the scope of his practice with his later works of multi-monitor installations, sound immersion pieces and "frozen-film" prints. Together they offer a new experience of his classic films and a novel presentation of his more recent video work. His work has been exhibited at the 51st Venice Biennial, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, the Ludwig Museum, the Serpentine Gallery, the Jewish Museum, and the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center.
In 2007, Mekas released one film every day on his website, a project he entitled "The 365 Day Project."Short Films Coming Soon to an iPod Near You, All Things Considered, November 5, 2006. Producer Ben Shapiro reports on a plan by filmmaker Jonas Mekas to make short films available as a podcast. The online diary is still ongoing on Jonas Mekas's official website. It was celebrated in 2015 with a show titled "The Internet Saga" which was curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi at Palazzo Foscari Contarini on the occasion of the 56th Venice Biennale of Visual Arts.
Beginning in the 1970s, Mekas taught film courses at the New School for Social Research, MIT, Cooper Union, and New York University.
Additionally, Mekas was a writer and published his poems and prose in Lithuanian, French, German, and English. His work has been translated into English by the Lithuanian-American poet Vyt Bakaitis in such collections as Daybooks: 1970-1972 (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2003) and a bilingual anthology of modern Lithuanian verse, Gyvas atodūsis/Breathing Free, poems (Lietuvos, 2001). Mekas published many of his journals and diaries, including I Had Nowhere to Go: Diaries, 1944–1954 and Letters from Nowhere, as well as articles on film criticism, theory, and technique. In 2007, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was opened in Vilnius.
One of Mekas's last exhibitions, "Notes from Downtown," took place at James Fuentes Gallery on the Lower East Side in 2018. Mekas's last work, Requiem, premiered posthumously at The Shed in New York City on November 1, 2019. The 84-minute video was commissioned by The Shed and Festspielhaus Baden-Baden. It screened in tandem with a performance of Verdi's Requiem, conducted by Teodor Currentzis and performed by the musicAeterna orchestra.Requiem - The Shed
In 2018, Ina Navazelskis, an oral historian at the National Institute for Holocaust Documentation, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum interviewed Mekas for their Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive. There, he discussed his memories of World War II.
"Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running", the filmmaker's first retrospective in the United States, was organized by Guest Curator Kelly Taxter and on view at the Jewish Museum in the spring of 2022.
German filmmaker Peter Sempel has made four films about Mekas' works and life, Jonas in the Desert (1991), Jonas at the Ocean (2004), Jonas in the Jungle (2013), and Jonas in the Fields (2021).
In July 2025, the ShowRoom Cinema and Parlor Gallery in Asbury Park, New Jersey, hosted the Jonas Mekas Film Festival, featuring screenings of his diary films and a reception showcasing his photographic stills—attended by his son Sebastian Mekas.
Personal life Mekas married the poet and editor Hollis Melton on June 7, 1974; the couple later divorced. They had two children, a daughter, Oona, and a son, Sebastian, both of which frequently appear in his "diary films". In a late interview with Alain Elkann, Mekas described his daughter Oona as "an actress and a film-maker operating from Los Angeles" and his son Sebastian as living with him in New York after having studied mathematics in Beijing and then linguistics, while noting that his wife was a "very good photographer.".
His adult children, along with Melton and other close family, frequently feature in his works. They have recalled his sense of belonging within the downtown New York art "family", describing it as a mixed, sometimes difficult circle of figures around Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, and Bob Dylan in which his household played a key role.
In interviews and the documentary Fragments of Paradise, Mekas and his children emphasize that he "filmed moments of life" compulsively and that the camera often felt like his closest companion, a habit his family experienced as a constant presence in their home.
Mekas died at his home in Brooklyn on January 23, 2019, at the age of 96.
Controversy over World War II activities Mekas long maintained that, while working for local newspapers, he also clandestinely transcribed BBC broadcasts in support of the underground. In 2018, an article in the New York Review of Books by historian Michael Casper challenged Mekas's versions of his wartime activities. Casper claims that Mekas participated "in an underground movement in Biržai that supported the 1941 Nazi invasion of Soviet Lithuania" and worked for "two ultranationalist and Nazi propaganda newspapers, until he fled Lithuania in 1944." Casper noted that Mekas's publications in these newspapers were not anti-Semitic.