Quote

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.

Jonas Mekas

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jonas Mekas
Age: 96 †
Born: 1922
Born: December 24
Died: 2019
Died: January 23
Film Director
Filmmaker
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Birzai
Time
Summer
Kennedy
Friendship
Inseparable
Spend
Sister
Fact
Mostly
Facts
Cinema
Part
Families
Summers
Matter
Fortune
Jackie
Children
Keys
Integral

More quotes by Jonas Mekas

Image
Yes, I got my first Bolex camera a few weeks after being dropped in New York by the United Nations Refugee Organization. That was on October 29th, 1949. With my brother Adolfas, we wanted to make a film about displaced persons, how one feels being uprooted from one's home.
Jonas Mekas
Image
An adventurer can always return home an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who stages scenes with actors, it has always been about the present moment.
Jonas Mekas
Image
I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
I am very active on the Internet. In 2007, I made one film every day and posted it on my website. That was a 365-day project, really exhausting, but I still put a lot of stuff on - from life, friends, my own life.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
Jonas Mekas
Image
I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called Film Culture.
Jonas Mekas
Image
I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.
Jonas Mekas
Image
Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
Jonas Mekas
Image
We need less perfect but more free films.
Jonas Mekas
Image
I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words, with material from my own life. I walk through life with my camera, and occasionally I film. I never think about scripts, never think about films, making films.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
Jonas Mekas
Image
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.
Jonas Mekas
Image
Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don't want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like that.
Jonas Mekas