A Tribute to Jonas Mekas I Adam Hyman, Oona Mekas

Adam: thank you all for sticking around we'll have the discussion now and then we'll have a short intermission and then we'll show "Reminiscences" please join me in welcoming back to Los Angeles Oona Mekas (applause) she lived here for a while We're delighted to have her back for the night Oona: thank you everyone for coming it's a really nice audience I'm gonna take a moment I hadn't seen that on the big screen Adam: there are program notes that if you didn't get them on your way in grab them on the way out but Oona now lives outside of Austin Texas but working in both film and as a birth worker and she also sits on the board for Anthology and and it's been working following the working with presentations tirelessly to help with Jonases special events honoring Jonas all this year Where was that last shot? Oona: I actually don't know Ken sent it to me in an email after he made it and then it I think it was on Instagram or something because Aza his son put it up there so I saw it only on little tiny things on the my phone but yeah I don't know where that was but it's probably one of the last times that he was shot so yeah thanks Kim Adam: well I thought we'd start with one question which mentioned I mean you sort of came up then being filmed yourself constantly by your father what would you say was that like what was the state of normal and then was that like as well to then have films where he's you know speaking to you as well? Oona: well I mean that was normal that was my normal so everybody here has their normal whether you grew up on a farm or in a city or somewhere else some other country like every everybody has what they consider as normal and then you meet other people and you realize that's not normal at all so it was really just life I was literally born in front of a camera so I guess it's not surprising that I spent some of my life in LA as an actress and yeah you know part of my early childhood memories are sitting in our loft watching things on being projected from a 16-millimeter projector most of the time in our house with some of these people that you just saw in Walden showing either their films or my father showing some of his stuff and this was just like a part of not daily life but just pretty regular to just have these things be around and I think a lot of the children experience the children of Stan Package and Ken Jacobs we all experienced this and P. Adam Sitney and David said something about creations and things that Ken had created and that my father had created and I thought there is one more thing that they created which was children and a lot of us ended up in some sort of way in the film industry or doing stuff with cinema which I find really interesting we're the second generation I guess Adam: are you still friends I mean I know you're still friends with Onza and so forth Oona: yeah we all attended my cousin's wedding and so it's really just the idea I forgot about this first reel and what was in it the wedding there is Adolphus his Jonas' brother's wedding to Pola and I just attended their son's wedding this summer and it was really kind of interesting in Skye Sydney who is P. Adam Sitney's daughter was there she is she holds a master's in Cinema Studies she runs a documentary film festival in Washington DC and then yes so we all just hang out together when we can you know we're all spread around the world but yeah we keep it going in our ways Adam: one thing we talked about earlier just going bit more into Jonas's films is perhaps what you see is some of the key things why was it important like that diaristic approach what else did you do you feel like some of the important touch tones in his films? Oona: this was "Walden" was the first film that really showed off this diaristic style or the diary film and then "Reminiscences" which I hope you stay for is another one of those and there's like I call it the trilogy I don't know if other people do but there's "Reminiscences" and there's two more they came after that and they create like the epitome of diary film of Jonas Mekas and everything that came after it when he says in Walden "I make home movies" that that is really what it is and it's this you know it it's it's somebody who knows about making films and knows about film history and but also there's something really personal that is not a professional filmic thing it's just really finding the humanity in moments you can see it in everything from the circus to girl in a field it's all about these little pieces and slices of humanity and he talks about that in a lot of his films and you can see it in the "Williamsburg" film as well just these little slices of people Adam: Were you ever around while he was editing as well? Oona: oh yeah I just hung out at the editing room all the time it one of my favorite places growing up watching him he taught me how to splice film nobody does that anymore To audience: Who here knows how to splice film who's under 40 all their hands went down okay oh wait no I see yeah like three four five it's a really important thing to know how to do I'm really glad that you guys get to see this on real film it's so different I mean just like me watching that one minute film at the end on my phone it's not the same but yeah he did all his editing had a very tiny room that's probably the size of some people's closets here and he had a moviola I got to play with that all the time that was really fun and he spent I mean hours it takes you know a really long time to do what he did because it's little frames and all that single frame stuff that was done in the camera and then he would look at it and edit it as he saw fit AdaM: any other insights or secrets on how he edited? Oona: No, he was a poet so he just kind of did it how I think it organically how it came to him yeah I don't have any insights Adam: What were his habits? Oona: a glass of white wine in the summer maybe always there and no food I probably brought food in there as a child but there's no just you know you had to he taught me you have to wait a specific amount of time and you have to count the seconds when the glue is there drying and if you don't wait that if you don't wait long enough you really screwed and you know but just patience and diligence and commitment yeah Adam: Talk to me about the importance of the immigrant experience for him in his work Oona: well as you saw in the "Williamsburg" piece he has all these shots of Lithuanian I some of you may not have realized that a lot of those shots of the stores with names are all Lithuanian names and there's one that says Lee the Jewish keg to Vey excuse me if you're actually Lithuanian and you're hearing me pronounce these words I haven't spoken to my speech person in a long time which is a market it's a Lithuanian market and so these were all over Brooklyn I mean it's he's making a joke but it's true like Williamsburg didn't used to be this hipster hangout it was a place where people came because that's where they could afford to live when they came you know on the boats and um yeah you can't talk about him without recognizing that he went through this really hard period before he even came to the United States and anybody who goes to that kind of experience whether you're going through a tunnel in Guatemala or you're you know crossing a desert or crossing a sea or anyway you be common immigrant to this country it's it's formative and it's it it informs your whole life and so he was lucky enough to transcend you know German work camps DP camps being never allowed to come back to his country for well not never but for decades and decades until the Soviet Union fell actually reminiscences is before the Soviet Union fell but when Khrushchev allowed certain people to come back but KGB was following him the whole time I mean it was really pretty intense well we get to see the KGB I think there might be a shot of the car that followed them all around as they made this trip through Lithuania and they never lost them I mean they just you know there were these it was it was unspoken but these were KGB just followed him around and in a black car and I still to this day sometimes think people are tapping my phone and you know this and then when when he was in the United States it was interesting because people didn't really recognize especially in the eighties during the Cold War seventies and he's the difference between an immigrant from us now Soviet country and you know an actual Soviet communist you know all that and so yeah they thought he was a Russian spy for a while there's this FBI file it's gigantic a lot of stuff is redacted black lines but I have not seen it my brother told me about I've seen I've seen the whole you know just the thing but not been able to look through it yet but Adolphus had a copy of his yeah they both had big dossiers or whatever you thought quote/unquote pornographic stuff and yeah I mean they were you know which was like how walden was different chronologically for like how well change from different to different to reminiscences Oh Walden was the first diary film so there's a big difference between the films he made before Walden and then Walden and you start to see a more personal life you start to see the stones are a family and he talks to Alexandra who you see at the very end he's addressing the little baby toddler in that shot and she's Alexander stone Barbossa don't actually just passed away this year so it's there's this personal element because they were friends and they were part of the film community in New York at that time and so but he was just going and having eggs you know and that's part of it it's not just you can't just like work with people and forget that your people you can't just like go to work and not have a conversation with with people or never have a meal with them so it was more than just this you know academic film community that sometimes we need to study it's like real people who had families and got married and ate eggs also that's the way he incorporated the filming into everything else I mean I was my first experience with him as well I came out and screened a couple things with Film Forum in between and after the show we went to the cat and fiddle pub on Sunset and he had whatever camera he was filming with a 97 I came from outdoor a super 8 er video and he just you know picked it up and it was this is this is filming yeah and we pass it around to everybody else at the table for all of them to film with as well yeah that's cool he didn't always do that that's that's that's some kind of anything he knew we were all but but he also said you said filming and that's exactly it he said I'm not a filmmaker I'm a filmer and there's a little bit of a difference there but it's also that additional element which was like it was always like a film community so like in the act of filming it was like not a precious Oh exactly and he later on it's not part of this program but he did something called 365 films which was a short film every day that could be and I remember when he did this I thought it was crazy and I was like 30 yeah decade okay so I was in my mid-30s and I was like what are you talking about so everybody can watch it on their iPod this was his idea that that he would make these short films it would be one film a day that could be downloaded and I was like downloaded onto what and I was so by the time that here is this guy it is 80s you know just thinking ahead like there's a lot of stuff you see there my friend sitting next to me said when she saw this she's not really that familiar with Jonases films and she said this is the faith it's like the first yeah boomerang oh that was can take a film not Jonas but it was this I mean all of these people it's not just Jonas but because he brought a lot of these people together and that's not with his films but with anthology and the filmmakers co-op like he really helped all these other people rise and do all these things Stan brackish I mean you could just go on and on naming the lists of people that we all just take for granted now with Instagram and boomerang and an MTV I mean MTV is basically just avant-garde filmmakers co-opted context yeah clever anybody out here have a question or inquiry as well you were talking a bit also earlier about his his recent read option by Lithuania let's say so do we count some of that and like how he's treated in Lithuania now and what's the museum oh right well I mean there's Lithuania is pretty small so like a museum in the middle of a village in near where he grew up is not like a museum where you like it that you can think of it's maybe like if you went to Pennsylvania and you went to the Amish country and I don't know they had the Museum of cheese or whatever but yeah they I mean he's he's known to a lot of people they're depending on generations and what they studied and what regime they were under as a poet not a filmmaker and so they're really starting to embrace now the filmmaking part of it and the poetry and and now that he's passed it's you know they can put it all together and see this whole body of work and life so yeah they want to make this little Museum in in BJJ which is near where he grew up where he was born and they want his hat he was very famous for wearing his hat and shoes and it's it's he would have thought it was kind of ridiculous but I think he would have been touched but there was a really tenuous relationship for a long time because I mean when you're not allowed to go back to your country because you'll be killed or because your relatives will be killed like it's not you kind of have to build a wall right because you can't just a lot of his films are about yearning and thinking of home but at the same time you have to cut something and so I think there was a line that was cut for a while and then you know Soviet Union fell and he slowly was able to talk to people and they kind of came out of hiding and so in recent years he went back quite a few times and there was a new community that he helped start there or may not start but just kind of revived and I mean let the wagons are pretty strong people and they made it through that whole thing so it's not like they're just rubes what's the monument describe the monument organ there the monument is his hat again the hat and it's you have to drive pretty far you have to probably drive like four hours out of Vilnius which is the capital to get to this place which is near the border of Latvia and it's the field where his the house where he was born was that the house was raised so it's just a field and right maybe 20 feet off the road is this huge stone pedestal and on top is this gigantic sculpture of a head it's it's really beautiful so if you ever go to Lithuania you look up you know you google where he was born you can google it and and you can figure out how to drive there and get there there's not that many roads questions thoughts up there please Midway wait for the microphone or just shout out and I'll repeat the question either way I'm curious if you could I'm interested in this concept of films diary I'm curious of the film is diary and if you could expand upon why it was important to Jonas to practice this sort of approach that feels to me like there's this company or this hybrid between an objective and subjective sort of perspective so I'm curious if that was intentional and if there's a reason to that if what was intentional making that kind of objective subjective thing approach yen perspective for us as audience I you know I think that's really hard for me to answer I'm not a scholar on him but I kind of know him better than a lot of people in certain ways but what I can imagine is that as a filmmaker and as an artist you just evolved right so he came in 49 here and he got his first camera and then he just started filming and I think what he realised he liked to do was film what what we're talking about which is this diary style so I think it's just what came naturally I don't think he ever made a conscious choice like I am going to create a diary film people are gonna talk about it it was just it was just what evolved I don't think he I don't think he liked to plan that much he was pretty organic yeah hold on for the mic please sir when he was doing Suzy notes on the circus do you know um was a double expose in camera or did he make those choices afterwards yes I'm pretty sure ever all the double exposures too bad my brother's not here he knows a lot of trivia like this yeah I'm pretty sure he did that all in his bollocks he did like all of he did a lot of editing in his bollocks as well you'd be surprised if you just look at the you know a long strip of film you would notice a lot of cuts going straight you know but if anybody knows different they could correct me you mean like if we went on vacation or something like that or or if he went to France I mean he had okay so depending on the decade he had his bollocks and he just maybe he had another one but I think he would just carry one there pretty heavy he carried just one bag and then he moved into video so he had just one video camera and then he moved into smaller video cameras and smaller video cameras until these last few years he just had this little I think it was made by Sony at one point the Japanese got really interested in him and Sony in particular would give him these cameras and he would try them out and then I think this last one was a gift and not from Sony but from from someone who thought he would really enjoy it was this tiny little they I don't even know what it was must have been just all digital and he left it just go right in your pocket and he could just take it out anywhere where all the cameras now boxes just random places yeah there's a couple I think one of his cameras is going to Lithuania there's a bunch of there's collections kind of all around and people probably are asking for that man I think there were six bull exists altogether yes good I will have my own Museum hi I know he died kind of early on but did you ever meet Jack Smith and the Jonas talked much about his relationship with Jack Smith and why they had such a strange relationship I always comes up not really at CUNY's that's an interesting question um I don't ever remember meeting him I don't remember when he passed but either I was a teen in the eighties in the eighties so I was a kid but I mean the thing is I knew a lot of these people when I was really young and I actually remember them we were talking about this earlier a lot of people look exactly the same in Ken's film I mean flow his wife now has white hair but she still looks exactly the same Harry Smith looked the same the whole time I knew him Jack Smith because they weren't exactly friends I never met it's not like he just came over to the house like some people but yeah I mean the only time I ever really heard him talking about him was when either Pete when people were asking him like what happened you know what what's up with Jack Smith and he always kind of um chuckled and you know I don't I think people make bigger deals out of things and the people themselves do so I can't being vague because I really don't know but I do know that it wasn't like any he wasn't holding a grudge but I heard maybe Jack Smith was that's just your say I don't know that well did he ever attend you do you ever speak to you about the the being jail the experience / Flaming Creatures yeah he thought that was really funny and I was always really proud of it because I was that kind of kid that wasn't embarrassing I was like my dad was jailed for it was really kind of like a again like this normal thing that I didn't realize like not everybody's parents just get arrested for doing stuff like that the what's really interesting is that the DA from New York who put him in jail apologized to him decades later and then they met after he I think he sent him a letter and apologized after he realized like oh that somebody's writing about him and this guy is actually like not this evil pornographic guy I thought he was that I should have put him in jail so he wrote this letter and then they met and reconciled and so that he loved that story too that he got to meet the the prosecutor who put him in in jail all those years past I think he was jailed twice and I don't remember what this I I think it could have been Jack Smith of both times I don't know if anybody knows Rosen was in LA who was arrested for that not Jonas cuz he didn't really come to LA very often but yeah I mean he just you know it was people get arrested all the time I mean Jane Fonda how many times has she been arrested just this week yeah just this week it's not it's not a big deal you know hi thank you for coming out and talking to us I was just curious how your father's work kind of sculpted your voice and your style and you know in your work going forward from there oh well I think that if you grew up watching stuff like this and I know not everybody got to you get a certain eye for things and so I'm really impatient with certain Hollywood movies although we watched a lot of Hollywood movies we watched all the Clint Eastwood movies and we watched all the Jackie Chan movies and we went through periods where this was like during VHS time so we would go to the video store and just one after the other after the other and so I got my dose of avant-garde cinema and independent stuff from Anthology Film Archives and I spent a lot a lot of time there as a young child and then I worked there in my 20s I think is just kind of inevitable if I were to become a filmmaker that I would be informed by my father's work and by everybody else's work that I saw how it did I don't know I thought I was thinking a little bit about it when I was watching Ken's film and then watching Walden it probably made me not want to try to mimic anything that I had seen before which is kind of hard because all of these styles of these different avakov filmmakers are so different so I mean you can see Ken's work is so obviously very different from Jonas's and they're very different from Yoko Ono or Stan Bracken or marine Menken Maya Deren so I think it just made me realize that I could be really independent and and not care about the Hollywood standards I lived in Hollywood so I had to care a little bit about them but at the same time I went back once I was living here and I went back and had dinner with a whole bunch of people and a meet Amin who was a longtime family friend and Village Voice critic New York Times anyway not New York Times film Artforum film comment yeah thank you and just old colleague of Jonah's as they were sitting there dinner with me and I was talking to them about a script I was writing and I had to and I said I have these two scripts and you know I met with this person and they said that I could never get it made because it just wasn't like I wouldn't have the audience for it and he Jonah started shaking his head and amy was like fuck them I don't want to quote her but it was something like that like shut up stop talking right now finished writing the script that you want to write and don't think about those people that guy is a jerk and he was he was a real jerk if you're in the room I will totally say it to your face I don't think you're here but anyway here's some producer but yeah just like that so you know having somebody like that as a parent really just teaches you like you can do anything and you don't have to follow the rules and you can create your own stuff and that's when anthology was all about is showing stuff that maybe nobody else wanted to to see or that you didn't think there was audience for it but there always was and that it deserves to be shown because you made it that was a the one thing that Joan is the one thing I remember from Jonas from that conversation that I once had I was like what do you think about you know curating film was like it's just important that the work gets shown yeah yeah I mean we would have people put like bringing dumpsters of films that were from old film labs going out of business and anthology took them all in it didn't matter what it was but we sifted through it and we went through it and some of it was really like amazing stuff made by people who maybe were not even alive anymore but like you know we would have these shows of stuff from the dumpster I don't remember what the title was but I'm sure dumpster was in it literally dumpsters dumpster dive yeah yeah house anthology curling anthology is going through a lot of changes you know when you lose lose the icon that was considered like the figurehead you go through a lot of changes I won't come back on the board this last year I was on it for I don't know many it's like two decades or something and then left and then came back we are trying to build an expansion project that was Jonas's dream basically he talked about it for years and years and years and we're getting pretty close to doing it it's many millions of dollars it's a whole building that goes over the original courthouse which is on the second Avenue and second Street and then there's this alleyway and there's this library that will be built and an archive and room for scholars like maybe some of you here in the room to be able to come and have state-of-the-art digitized stuff that's available for everybody it's really important to keep it going and we're Jonas always called it's a sinking ship that never sinks so we are not sinking well we are seeking but we're not gonna think but yeah it's it's a struggle it's a especially I think in this climate it's really hard to be a non-profit Film Archive even if you're in New York City I think you know it's just really hard yeah but do they have control yeah I mean yes it's it's owned outright by the city gave the building to the to anthology so that where the rent is not the thing to worry about it's the overhead it's it's paying staff salaries and making sure they have a living wage I mean even something as simple as the living wage is really hard for a non-profit so especially that because big donors yeah they want they don't want the rent on the building yeah one big donors want to build buildings they don't want to pay people and it's like well you need people to be there and make the place run otherwise there's no place so that's where right now and as a board member like I really entreat everybody to you know look into it and I know there's probably some students here there's there's lots of opportunities to help and you know I took over the phone tracing from my dad I guess that's your truest family legacy yeah but that's I think also so vitally important that you're able to you know and that you're able to preserve a legacy of his legacy but there's so many of us who sort of pass on or continue to thrive within his inspiration within structures that he set up and in a way of looking at the world so thank you with I think it's time for the intermission as well so I wanted to thank we're gonna make us for joining us tonight the truth thank you all for coming thank you always great to see you we're gonna do like a 10-minute intermission and then come back for reminiscences of attorney to stay it's a beautiful thank you