BY INESA BRASISKE, LUKAS BRASISKIS AND KELLY TAXTER WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY ED HALTER, MELISSA RAGONA AND ANDREW UROSKIE PUBLISHED BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2022 EXCERPTS FROM THE INTRODUCTION:
Jonas Mekas arrived in New York City on October 29, 1949, with his younger brother Adolfas. Penniless and war-weary, the two men nonetheless swiftly integrated into the city’s thriving counterculture. Jonas became a prolific moving image maker and central organizer within the avant-garde community and a visionary maker and producer of American independent film.
Through his entwined forms of first-person accounting, Mekas centered his outsiderness and upturned his marginal status aS A displaced person, then immigrant, and finally artist. He began filming in 1950, not yet sure what he wanted to achieve but committed to the act itself, using the camera as a tool to fight against the wrenching loneliness of exile and to resist the violent erasure of being ‘other’.
In “Walden”, comprising footage shot between 1964 and 1968, Mekas eschews both linearity and hierarchy, instead presenting a churning whirlpool of times past and present; places urban and pastoral; quotidian moments and watershed events; family members, cultural icons, and public figures. Mekas seamlessly orchestrates collisions of disparate materials, suggesting a radical interconnectedness that allows for even small and seemingly inconsequential moments to change the course of history.