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There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

Jonas Mekas

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Jonas Mekas
Age: 96 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 24
Died: 2019
Died: January 23
Film Director
Filmmaker
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Birzai
Break
Derangement
Way
Cinematic
Official
Frozen
Conventions
Officials
Senses
Complete

More quotes by Jonas Mekas

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I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.
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You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
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An adventurer can always return home an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
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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.
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Suddenly the intermedia shows are all over town..Theirs remains the most dramatic expression of the contemporary generation. The place where its needs and desperations are most dramatically split open. At the Plastic Inevitable it is All Here and Now and the Future.
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For an artist, to be normal is a disaster
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Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that's where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.
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As a film-maker and a poet, I feel it's my duty to be an eye and an antenna to what's happening around me. I always felt a solidarity with those who are desperate and confused and misused and are seeking a way out of it.
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I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
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For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens - that's what is, that's what I'm possessed by.
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In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
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Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf.
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The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema.
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We are the measure of all things. And the beauty of our creation, of our art is proportional to the beauty of ourselves of our souls.
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My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.
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I'm a filmmaker, but my working procedures are different. All my basic structuring is done during the filming. You know, how long I keep the shot, the exposure or the speed - slower or faster, etc. That's structuring. And then there is a second stage of structuring that comes later when I begin to put those pieces together.
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My life is essentially not so unique. On some deeper levels we feel the same, we know the same things. Therefore if I show my life 365 days, moments from those days, it will reflect and it will have connection with lives of all of us.
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We need less perfect but more free films.
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I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called Film Culture.
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I'm not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with my video camera, it can only record what is happening now. I am celebrating reality and the essence of the moment. And that's the greatest challenge that I have.
Jonas Mekas