News

CLOSE-UP & SPOOLPOOL PRESENT:

AN EVENING IN THE COMPANY OF JONAS MEKAS

Thursday 17th July 2008

7.30pm:
AWARD PRESENTATION TO ANDY WARHOL
USA | 1963 | 16mm | BW | 12 min

7.45pm:
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE
USA | 1999 | 16mm | Colour & BW | 35 min

8.35pm:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JOHN
USA | 1971-95 | 16mm | Colour | 18 min

9.00pm:
ZEFIRO TORNA
USA | 1992 | 16mm | Colour | 34 min

Followed by a Q & A with Jonas Mekas.

Venue: Café 1001, Room 2, 91 Brick Lane, London E1
Doors open at 7pm | Tickets: £3 / £2 Members (no booking available. Please bring your membership card with you)

4.00pm:
BIRTH OF A NATION
USA | 1997 | 16mm | Colour | 80 mins

Followed by a Q & A with Jonas Mekas.

£12.00 / £9.00 Close-Up & Curzon Members (Please bring your membership card with you)

Venue: Curzon Soho, 99 Shaftesbury Avenue London W1

Box Office: 0871 7033 988

Award Presentation To Andy Warhol
USA | 1963 | 16mm | BW | 12 min

Dec. 7, 1964: Andy Warhol receives the independent filmmakers' award. The award, from Film Culture magazine, was for Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire. The event took place at the New Yorker Theatre on 89th Street and Broadway. The original idea was to show some of Warhol's films, and then present him with the award onstage. However, Warhol did not want a public presentation so Jonas Mekas filmed him at the Factory and then showed the film at the New Yorker Theatre ceremony.

This Side Of Paradise
USA | 1999 | 16mm | Colour & BW | 35 min

“Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of late sixties and early seventies, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition, life without a father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began.

The images in this film, with a few exceptions, all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. These were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These were days of Little Fragments of Paradise.”  - Jonas Mekas

Happy Birthday To John
USA | 1971-95 | 16mm | Colour | 18 min

“On October 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., to celebrate the opening of John Lennon/Yoko Ono Fluxus show, designed by George Maciunas. Same day, a smaller group gathered in a local hotel room to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a record of that occasion. The soundtrack consists of the birthday party singing by John, Yoko, Ringo Starr, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Oaks, and many others. The film includes footage of John Lennon/Yoko Ono concert at Madison Square Garden, August 30, 1972, the Vigil in Central Park on Dec. 8th, 1980, and some other rare footage.”  -  Jonas Mekas

Zefiro Torna
USA | 1992 | 16mm | Colour | 34 min

“Images from the life of George Maciunas. Includes footage I took of George in 1952, at his parents’ house, with his father and mother and sister Nijole. Bits of Fluxus events and performances, and picnics with friends (Almus, Andy Warhol, John Lenon, Yoko Ono, etc.); George’s wedding and footage I took of him in Boston Hospital three days before he died.” - Jonas Mekas

Birth Of A Nation
USA | 1997 | 16mm | Colour | 80 min

"One hundred and sixty portraits or rather appearances, sketches and glimpses of avant-garde, independent filmmakers and film activists between 1955 and 1996. Why Birth Of A Nation? Because the film independents IS a nation in itself. We are surrounded by commercial cinema Nations, the same way as the indigenous people of the United States or of any other country are surrounded by the Ruling Powers. We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are the cinema." - Jonas Mekas

 

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniškiai, Lithuania. He currently lives and works in New York. In 1944, Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas, were taken by the Nazis and imprisoned in a forced labor camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. After the War, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946-48 and at the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the U.S. settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16-mm camera and began to record moments of his life. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel's pioneering cinema 16, and he began screening his own films in 1953. He has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the "New American Cinema," as he dubbed it in the late '50s, playing various roles: in 1954, he became editor and chief of Film Culture; in 1958 he began writing his "Movie Journal" column for the Village Voice; in 1962 he co-founded the Film- Makers' Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. His own output ranging from narrative films (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to documentaries (the Brig, 1963) and to "diaries" such as Walden (1969); Lost, Lost, Lost, (1975); Reminiscences of a Voyage to Lithuania, (1972); Zefiro torna, (1992) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001) have been screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world. Recently, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the American Museum of the Moving Image screened Letters from Greenpoint and the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick, England, Monash University Museum of Art, and Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia, held exhibitions for Mekas this past fall. In May 2006, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. held a lecture entit!
 led "meet the artist" and screened Reminisces of a Journey to Lithuania. The Directors Guild of America awarded Anthology Film Archives a DGA Honours recognizing the centre’s dedication to preserving the art of cinema. In its annual selection of 25 films, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania was esteemed by the United States National Film Preservation Board to be selected for preservation at the Library of Congress' National Film Registry. His films were also screened at Art Basel Miami and Mekas was honoured at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association's award ceremony for his significant contribution to American film culture. Most recently, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius, Lithuania and exhibitions will focus on art and film collections by Mekas and his friend and artistic collaborator Jurgis Mačiūnas, founder of the Fluxus art movement. The Center will house an extensive avant-garde film archive and library and has plans to build a Fluxus Research Institute.

CLOSE-UP inf.