Jonas Mekas
Lithuanian American filmmaker
Died when: 96 years 30 days (1152 months)Star Sign: Capricorn
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Jonas Mekas (Lithuanian: ['jon?s 'mæk?s];December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema".
Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide.Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the journal Film Culture.
He was also the first film critic for The Village Voice.In the 1960s, Mekas launched anti-censorship campaigns in defense of the LGBTQ-themed films of Jean Genet and Jack Smith, garnering support from cultural figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag.
Mekas mentored and supported many prominent American artists and filmmakers, including Ken Jacobs, Peter Bogdanovich, Chantal Akerman, Richard Foreman, John Waters, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono, and Martin Scorsese.
He helped launch the writing careers of the critics Andrew Sarris, Amy Taubin, and J.Hoberman.In a 2018 New York Review of Books article, postdoctoral researcher Michael Casper wrote about Mekas's contributions to two far-right, collaborationist newspapers under the Nazi occupation of Lithuania during World War II.
Casper noted that Mekas’s publications in these newspapers were not anti-Semitic.
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