Jonas Mekas Quotes

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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 Quotes: I'm working in a form
Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket camera and put it on websites. I think that's where the most exciting kind of imagery and content is being recorded and exchanged today.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Just as in writing, there
Some day, years later, in our memories, we'll return back to these places, and we'll toss about and we won't be able to sleep, thinking, remembering...it will all come back and we won't be able to change anything...
So I wish that then, years later, you wouldn't regret anything and you wouldn't want to change anything at all - a life lived perfectly, a perfect memory...
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Some day, years later, in
There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: There is no other way
For me, to catch, to celebrate the reality and life and friends and everything around me the very moment it happens - that's what is, that's what I'm possessed by.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: For me, to catch, to
I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I had the fortune to
The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000)
Jonas Mekas Quotes: The pain is stronger than
I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I've seen recently - they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I've read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don't remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else - simply nothingness.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I read a lot. I
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 Quotes: Some cameras are heavier and
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 Quotes: Once you change the technology
I am living with these pigs, with these horses and with these cows.
Every day I have to look at their blank eyes, their stupid bellies.
They call themselves by the names of various nationalities. As if that would make any difference!
Germans, French, Italians, Croatians, Russians, Poles, and other animals.
Thank you for the pleasure!
I love animals, but only real animals.
I love animals who do not pretend to be humans.
You should look, sometimes, into the eyes of real cows. They are serene, quiet, round. They are good, so good. Like medicine.
I like being with cows. I have spent much of my life with them. They do not know greed, they do not play politics. I love them.
Protect me from human beings!
Let me live with cows!
I'll live as a shepherd, if that's the only way.
You are driving me out of my mind, you, the Thinking Animals!
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I am living with these
The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."
Jonas Mekas Quotes: The deeper I went into
You want me to be rational. The most rational thing is the machine. Go to the machines. All their separate parts work together. But I live with no purpose, irrationally.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: You want me to be
What is the total sum of autumn? What is its content, form purpose? Its style, certainly, has unity. But what does it amount to? Eh, but what did the summer amount to, with all its greenery and flowers and sun? Fountains of red and brown will shot out soon. That's what the summer amounted to.

And you ask me about movies. I don't know what any movie amounts to. I am looking more for some light behind it, behind the images; I am trying to see the man.

It was Barbara Wise who said to me the other day - and she was right: The film critic should not explain what the movie is all about, surely an impossible task; he should help to create the right attitude for looking at movies. That's what my rambling is all about, nothing more.

Where was I? Yes, rambling. I will tell you the real truth: All that I have learned in my life (and I have seen many movies) amounts to this: Leaves are falling every autumn. I will be there with my camera when they fall.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: What is the total sum
It's more difficult for a mother to forget one child than for living humanity to forget all the millions who died in this war.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: It's more difficult for a
A meeting with nature means to me sometimes more than meeting with a person. It wakes up feelings, memories. Its arrows shoot deep, always on target
Jonas Mekas Quotes: A meeting with nature means
Once there was a man who was asked by God to do some little thing. It was just a little thing, and I don't know what it was. Do this, he was told, and this earth will again turn into Paradise. There won't be any kings, nobody will have to work, everybody will be free and happy, etc.

Now, this man kept thinking: to do it or not to do it. One day he thinks that he should do it, next day he isn't sure, he thinks that maybe he shouldn't do it. "Why do we need a Paradise? Let the people work, a big deal? It's good for your system." Next day again he thinks: "Maybe, after all, it would be nice not to work, not to do anything." And so it went. He couldn't make up his mind. Day after day he thought about it. And so he died, one day. And it's a pity. He could have brought Paradise back to earth.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Once there was a man
Let us build our houses with our own hands. And grow the wheat, and bake the bread.
Then we'll know what the earth is.
Now, we turn the knob: the water runs. I have no idea from where or how.
Electricity...
We buy the bread: we don't know who bakes it, how, where.
The same with our lives now.
We live, but we don't know how, where, why.
And it has no taste.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Let us build our houses
I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I began writing poetry when
Yesterday Leonas was telling me that he has never seen me in love yet. "Fall in love", he said.
I think I am always in love. Falling in and out of love, constantly. That's my trouble. Everytime I see a girl, my heart goes tuk-tuk-tuk.
Leonas says, that it is not normal. What kind of love is this! Nothing really!
Eh, what do we know about love? It's more difficult to love a woman like a flower than to love a woman like a woman, and rarer, too...
The love of flowers is the love of children and poets... Poets can love unseen subtleties that they glimpse here and there, that are missing in the world but which they want to bring back into the world...
One such quality is innocence.
Eh, they are like dreams, the young girls, they come and they go...
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Yesterday Leonas was telling me
When I came to New York in 1949, there was already an entire fresh avant-garde film movement blooming in New York and California. It was a very, very exciting period!
Jonas Mekas Quotes: When I came to New
You have the possibility to give light a dimension in time.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: You have the possibility to
In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what we are talking about. But in non-narrative cinema, we are a little bit lost. So sometimes, the only way to make us understand what we are talking about is to use the term 'avant-garde.'
Jonas Mekas Quotes: In narrative cinema, a certain
I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on miserable paper. That was, for many years, what art was for me. But from those miserable black-and-white reproductions, I got something, something unmistakable.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I myself saw the great
We have learned to eat like snakes. When there is something to eat - we eat enough to last for a week. When there is nothing - we don't eat. Now, when we get our food supply, we eat it all, right there, we leave nothing for tomorrow. Like the birds. And then we read our books. We go after spiritual food...
Jonas Mekas Quotes: We have learned to eat
<...>What a hell am I doing here? Why do I need a degree? I haven't heard a single sentence during all these lectures that would inspire one single line of poetry.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: <...>What a hell am I
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 Quotes: I am very active on
Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Place means nothing to me.
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 Quotes: I always work only with
The hygienic slickness of our contemporary films, be they from Hollywood, Paris, or Sweden, is a contagious sickness that seems to be catching through space and time. Nobody seems to be learning anything, either from Lumière or from the neorealists: Nobody seems to realize that the quality of photography in cinema is as important as its content, its ideas, its actors. It is photography that is the midwife, that carries life from the street to the screen, and it depends on photography whether this life will arrive on the screen still alive.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: The hygienic slickness of our
My films are the celebration of reality, of life, of my friends, of actual daily life that passes and is gone tomorrow. We don't pay attention to it when it happens.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: My films are the celebration
I live, therefore I make films. I make film, therefore I live. Life. Movement. I make home movies, therefore I live. I live, therefore I make home movies.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: I live, therefore I make
Today it's snowing, so beautifully, all white! And only yesterday I was very sad, I thought there won't be any winter this year. I can't imagine a winter without snow. Can a Lithuanian live without snow? Could a Lithuanian ever live only with green and brown and red? In Brazil, or Australia? Oh, my God, how would that be possible, without snow, without ice flowers on the windows, without the biting cold? You look at those white distances and something wakes up in you, something so close to you... Or when you listen to the wind banging outside, how it spills on the window glass with thin cold icy snow flakes. You put your forehead against the night window and you stare into the dark and see the snow fall, and hear a soft thumping of feet in the street below.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Today it's snowing, so beautifully,
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 Quotes: Suddenly the intermedia shows are
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 Quotes: In a meadow full of
All nature is full of hatred for humans. I don't think man has any friends among plants or animals. I suspect that even dogs and cats, those so-called best friends of man, are only pretending friendship to man in order to spy on his misdeeds, and they would betray him without blinking an eye the first chance they had. They know that Man is the worst of the beasts.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: All nature is full of
Seek the insignificant small but essential qualities, essential to life
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Seek the insignificant small but
Most of my videos consist of fragments, one or two minutes long. They are haikus or sketches. I have thousands.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: Most of my videos consist
How to live? To fall, to fall, with eyes closed, to fall into every occasion, into everything.
Jonas Mekas Quotes: How to live? To fall,
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