Jonas Mekas interview

Courtesy one of the fellow members of Group 5, Myfanwy Collins, I found an online magazine I'd never heard of, 3 AM, and this interview with filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

Mekas, the eminence grise of American experimental film, has a spot in my personal history. The first time I ever came to SF was during Xmas break during my senior year in college, where I was studying film criticism. During this vacation I took my first-ever long solo car trip, out to L.A. (where I went to a bunch of films that hadn't yet hit Austin) and up the coast to S.F. I stayed with my aunt on the Peninsula, and the morning after my arrival, found in the Chronicle a notice for an event that night at the SF Museum of Modern Art: a program of experimental films by Jonas Mekas. I'd never really heard of Mekas, but it seemed like a wonderfully artsy thing to do, so I went. I dragged along my extremely straight cousin, who was utterly mystified by the experiemental films. That experience of doing something weird and artsy my first night ever in San Francisco stuck with me. I later bought and devoured a book comprised of Mekas' columns on film from the Village Voice. This book, Movie Journal, is full of great writing. Years after I'd lost that first copy, I got another on alibris.com.

Here's one entry from Mekas' Village Voice "Movie Journal" column, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

April 18, 1963

Flaming Creatures and the Ecstatic Beauty of the New Cinema

Walked out of the following movies: Five Miles to Midnight, The Balcony, Lazarillo, Mondo Cane, The Playboy of the Western World, The Pillar of Fire, Four Days of Naples, Fiasco in Milan, Grown Up Children.

My new wave of walk-outs is the result, mainly, of my recent trip to the Eastman Museum in Rochester, where I saw really great movies. Like Chaplin's The Kid; or Murnau's Tabu; or Buñuel's L'Age d'Or; or Von Sternberg's Docks of New York -- really great movies.

Jack Smith just finished a great movie, Flaming Creatures, which is so beautiful that I feel ashamed even to sit through the current Hollywood and European movies. I saw it privately, and there is little hope that Smith's movie will ever reach the movie theatre screens. But I tell you, it is a most luxurious outpouring of imagination, of imagery, of poetry, of movie artistry -- comparable only to the work of the greatest, like Von Sternberg.

Flaming Creatures will not be shown theatrically because our social-moral-etc. guides are sick. That's why Lenny Bruce cried at Idlewild Airport. This movie will be called pornographic, degenerate, homosexual, trite, disgusting, etc. It is all that, and it is so much more than that. I tell you, the American movie audiences today are being deprived of the best of the new cinema, and it's not doing any good to the souls of the people.

Check the date on that again: 1963. American culture was changing; the Sinatra-Kennedy-Elvis era was about to end. And the only people who knew it were the bohemians, the artists, the queer and the crazed.