Adolfas Mekas

Windflowers

Adolfas Mekas

John Kramer, Pola Chapelle

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

Companeras and Companeros

Adolfas Mekas, Barbara Stone

A feature documentary about Cuba’s youth: the student, the worker, the peasant, the teacher, the soldier. These young compañeras and compañeros illustrate what the Cuban Revolution is really all about as they discuss their thoughts on the revolution, theories on guerrilla warfare, commitment to building Che’s “New Man”, and camaraderie with those fighting for change across the globe.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage

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.

Going Home

Adolfas Mekas, Pola Chappelle

Pola Chapelle, Adolfas Mekas

A home movie by Adolfas Mekas and wife Pola Chapelle on their travels to Lithuania and Europe. It was filmed concurrently with the more highly regarded “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” by Jonas Mekas, brother to Adolfas.

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life

Jonas Mekas

Kenneth Anger, Adolfo Arrieta

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

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

Jonas Mekas

Pola Chapelle, Peter Kubelka

A 1971–72 documentary film by Jonas Mekas. It revolves around Mekas' trip back to Semeniškiai, the village of his birth.

Diaries, Notes, and Sketches

Jonas Mekas

Timothy Leary, Ed Emshwiller

An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.

Lost, Lost, Lost

Jonas Mekas

Peter Beard, Ed Emshwiller

Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.

Birth of a Nation

Jonas Mekas

Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.

Guns of the Trees

Jonas Mekas

Frances Stillman, Ben Carruthers

A depressed woman, Barbara, is on the verge of suicide while a man she meets in a church and a married couple try to convince her that life is worth living.

Hallelujah the Hills

Adolfas Mekas

Peter Beard, Sheila Finn

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.

Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel

Jonas Mekas

Adolfas Mekas

Jonas Mekas zoomed in from a completely different angle for his Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel. This fake interview with ‘Lapland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs’ brings an outsider’s perspective to bear on the US war, and discusses with ironic perplexity if it might not be possible to kill off the Viet Cong more cheaply. For, whilst white students in the US primarily took issue with the war in South-eastern Asia, African-Americans remained predominantly concerned with their own situation. For them, daily discrimination at home and the Vietnam War were simply two faces of the same racist coin

The Double-Barrelled Detective Story

Adolfas Mekas

Jeff Siggins, Greta Thyssen

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.

The Genius

Emily Breer, Joe Gibbons

Joe Gibbons, Karen Finley

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.

Skyscraper

Adolfas Mekas

Pola Chapelle, Paul Sorvino

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.

Underground New York

Gideon Bachmann

Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke

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.