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Jonas Mekas (1922-2019), Lithuanian-born poet, philosopher and film-maker, has made hundreds of films and set up the Anthology Film Archive. He emigrated to American in 1949 where he earned the title of 'the godfather of American avant-garde cinema'. [Listener: Amy Taubin; date recorded: 2003]

TRANSCRIPT: The idea of the film... of the Anthology Film Archives was that it will be very select, it will establish a repertory of avant-garde independent and classic cinema, that will just keep running and running so that those who want to know more or less what has been achieved in cinema as an art 'till now could have some idea by seeing if we could... if we attempted to reduce it to a... we managed at the point that we ended our selection, film selection meetings, we had established a little film selection committee, we ended up with about 300 films.

Now, there was a need at that time already for such a selection, for such a... what we call the Essential Cinema Collection repertory. Around 1969, 1970 there was already so much demand across the country for programs of the avant-garde independent cinema that help was needed and because some of the people who were in distant cities in United States, very far from New York, or San Francisco, they had no occasion to see some of those films. They had no idea what really those films are about. They had heard, you know, that and that some titles, some names, so whenever they wanted to show one or two or three programs, they always called me or P Adams Sitney. And we finally got tired of preparing those programs – we did it once, we did it ten times, we did it 30 times then we said, 'It's enough'. Why don't we instead prepare a list of what we think is important, what has been achieved in the avant-garde film and then when somebody asks for advice we just send them that list and say, 'Everything you... anything that is on this list is of importance for one or other reason and you can take any film and show, and that's it'. So, that is, at that point, and we did not want that list selected by me or just P Adams Sitney or some other one person, we thought there should be like four or five people, there should be more, more opinions. So we created a little committee of five filmmakers and film sort of historians, theoreticians and that is how that originated and those meetings and purchases of all of the films that we voted in into the repertory were purchased with the monies from Jerome Hill. He established a special film art foundation to support that.

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