Inspired by Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, Jonas Mekas’ Requiem is a work that explores the theme of death and memory through a poetic and intimate lens. Made in 2019 (shortly before its author’s passing), the film combines powerful visual images and an editing that reflects grief and loss. Mekas, a legendary figure in avant-garde cinema, uses his experimental approach to filmmaking to create a personal and universal reflection on the end of life, celebrating the memory of those who have passed. A cinematic tribute that fits into the broader context of his artistic research on the impermanence of time and existence.

The Scrapbook is the fundamental trace of Mekas’s commitment, which lasted throughout the twentieth century and beyond, to modern absolument art. Contaminating autobiography by fragments and criticism of culture, this collection of writings is the most direct testimony to his positions and passions, and reads like a guide to that season of harmonic perversion and feverish creativity that was the 1960s in New York. One encounters in the book, made up mostly of out-takes, the protagonists of New American Cinema, such as Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, and its precursors Joseph Cornell, Kenneth Anger, and Jean Genet; artists associated with the Fluxus community, such as John Cage, Yōko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Hermann Nitsch; to Mekas’ best friends, including Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg. All of these figures return in this “scrapbook” collected from 1954 to 2010, a notebook set up by Mekas himself with edited texts and numerous unpublished ones: diary pages, theater reviews, essays, notes on dance and notes on photography, militant interventions, conversations-most notably the two with Susan Sontag (1969, 1994), and the one with Pasolini in ’67, when Mekas toured Italy carrying the Avant-Garde Film Travelling Library.

Jonas Mekas

Jonas Mekas (Semeniškiai, 1922 – New York, 2019) did not consider himself a filmmaker – “I do not make films. I just film” – rather he liked to call himself a “filmer,” a “filmmaker.” Having emigrated to Brooklyn from Lithuania in 1949 with his brother Adolfas, Mekas created, with his diary films, a language rooted in the concreteness shared by life and cinema, revolutionizing the experience of remembering through images. The titles of his films are proof of this: Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1985), As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000) and all the others. Founder of “Film Culture” magazine, first director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, animator of the Anthology Film Archives, Mekas was the lyrical pioneer of underground cinema and the dogged protector of the American avant-garde. From his black-and-white debut with Guns of the Trees (1961) to the testamentary Requiem (2019), Mekas’ work on film and video has involved every moment and every aspect of his personal history, including his work as a critic, without ever distinguishing it from the collective present of the United States. So much so that the FBI went so far as to suspect him of anti-American activities for filming The Brig (1964), a reportage of the Living Theatre play of the same name set in a Marine prison.