Jonas Mekas in conversation with Erick Hawkins and Lucia Dlugoszewski, Judith Malina and Julian Beck (The Living Theater), Pier Paolo Pasolini, Richard Foreman, Susan Sontag, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Kubelka, Nam June Paik, John Lennon & Yoko Ono
450 pages
Approx. 100 black and white illustrations
Thread-sewn paperback
Leipzig, December 2019
Edition number 2
Width 16 cm
Length 21.5 cm
Language English
Editor Anne König
Author Jonas Mekas
Designer Fabian Bremer, Pascal Storz
Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, John Lennon & Yoko Ono — Jonas Mekas was closely familiar with many New York artists. The native Lithuanian came to Brooklyn via Germany in 1949 and began making his first experimental films there. Mekas developed a form of diary film in which he recorded his everyday observations. He became a seismograph of the New York art scene and a pioneer of American avant-garde cinema.
From 1958 onwards he published his legendary column “Movie Journal” every week in the Village Voice, in which he wrote not only about films. He conducted numerous discussions with artists, some of which now appear for the first time in his Scrapbook of a Sixties. The book contains published and unpublished texts that show Jonas Mekas as an attentive diarist and unique chronicler of the present for over 50 years.