Self-Portrait

Jonas Mekas, USA, 1980, 20’

In what one could call Jonas Mekas’ first video blog, the Lithuanian avant-garde filmmaker reflects on his life and the art of cinema and representation.

Bio Jonas Mekas

Lithuanian-born Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) is known as the godfather of the American avant-garde. Mekas made films and wrote for The Village Voice and Film Culture, the magazine he founded with his brother. In addition to his poems and films, the importance of Mekas lies mainly in the context he created for other artists. He organised festivals and events and founded the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op and the Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s most important archives and screening sites for avant-garde cinema.

Cinema often tends to exist in mourning mode. Purists lament most technological novelties as one step further towards film’s inevitable death. Yet for Jonas Mekas—clearly a medium optimist—cinema eternally remains at its beginning. In Self-Portrait (1980), the Lithuanian filmmaker exceptionally features in front of the camera, delivering a manifesto of sorts that covers his own work, the moving image and reality—all while drinking a can of beer in the afternoon heat. Crucially, Mekas is not filmed but taped; he declares himself a man of film, but we know he will later embrace video, too. On the one hand, in perfect Mekasian fashion, this 20-minute unedited footage seems no more than a memory of an uneventful sunny day. On the other hand, this is an act in support of video and all the other tools that are still to come, for, as he explains, no kind of image is above another. They all serve to reinvent and expand the art of cinema. Looking brightly into the future, Self-Portrait is also somewhat of a proto-vlog, anticipating the kind of visual revolution and self-interaction with the camera that the Internet brought—the subject of Olivia Rochette and Gerard-Jan Claes’ Because We Are Visual.

Dora Leu