Jonas Mekas famous quotes

03-28-2025

For an artist, to be normal is a disaster
-- Jonas Mekas

#Artist #Normal #Disaster
In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Civilization #Politician #Poet
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

#Expression #Needs #Generations
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

#Focus #Cameras #Video
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

#Art #Soul #Creation
Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life
-- Jonas Mekas

#Quality #Essentials #Insignificant
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they donâ€™t care about my cinema. In Europe they donâ€™t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!
-- Jonas Mekas

#Europe #United States #Cinema
I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Art #Squares #Black
Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Two #Long #Video
I always work only with friends, but it must be about them and myself. Because I film only very personal moments, nothing preplanned, staged or written, it has to be real and spontaneous. Some of them have become famous, some are not yet famous, some will never be famous. But they are all my friends.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Real #Film #Moments
I make home movies-therefore I live. I live-therefore I make home movies
-- Jonas Mekas

#Home
Since 1950 I have been keeping a film diary. I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality: situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year. On some days I shoot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes. Or I shoot nothing. Walden contains material from the years 1964-1968 strung together in chronological order.
-- Jonas Mekas

#New York #Reality #Order
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

#Long #Together #Different
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

#Reality #Essence #Challenges
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

#Technology #Giving #Tree
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

#Stuff #Film #Internet
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

#Thinking #Cameras #Cinema
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

#Cameras #Pockets #Needs
There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Frozen #Way #Break
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

#Unique #Connections #Levels
Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Home #Mean
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

#Brother #New York #Home
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

#Confused #Eye #Way
I brought Yoko Ono to New York and gave her her first job there. I was editing a magazine called 'Film Culture.'
-- Jonas Mekas

#Jobs #New York #Editing
We need less perfect but more free films.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Perfect #Needs #Film
In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Flower #Color #Smell
In 1962, we created the Filmmakers' Co-Op because nobody wanted to distribute our films. If we had the Internet in those days, we wouldn't have needed the Co-Op.
-- Jonas Mekas

#Film #Internet #Needed

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