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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.

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
Deeper
Okay
Needed
Went
Culture
Country
Real
Confused
Something
Cinema

More quotes by Jonas Mekas

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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
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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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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
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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
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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
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In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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We need less perfect but more free films.
Jonas Mekas
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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
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For an artist, to be normal is a disaster
Jonas Mekas
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I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.
Jonas Mekas
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You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas