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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

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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
Reality
Daily
Film
Films
Life
Pay
Tomorrow
Gone
Attention
Passes
Friends
Celebration
Happens
Actual

More quotes by Jonas Mekas

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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.
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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I missed my teenage years. I was never a teenager.
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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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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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
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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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You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
Jonas Mekas
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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.
Jonas Mekas
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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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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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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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I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
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We need less perfect but more free films.
Jonas Mekas
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For an artist, to be normal is a disaster
Jonas Mekas
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An adventurer can always return home an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture.
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