To listen to more of Jonas Mekas’s stories, go to the playlist:
[ Ссылка ]

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: We began, myself and my brother, writing scripts already, you know, in the displaced person camps in '58, in '48,'49 before we came to New York.

Then when we came to New York, I, we finished together one script and then I finished another one by myself and we thought, we had this illusion that, you know, there are people in Hollywood that will produce, you know, will buy and produce our scripts, so well, there was money, actually we asked for money, we did not try to sell. We sent Stanley... To Zimmermann to Stanley Kramer to Flaherty, to Kazan. We sent, and of course we, some of them never answered, some of them wrote back; I have the letters. Like Flaherty telling us, 'How can I help you if I cannot find money myself for my own films? Well, I like your script, you know, and I would like to help, but I cannot'. The same came, I think, from Jerry Walderson. And so we, at some point, we gave up on it, we said this is not, it won't work. And then, it came already around '54 when we were already practically 100% in our interest in the independent and avant-garde. We said, that's, we like, you know, we spent our nights, many nights on 42nd Street, watching all the Hollywood movies, but that was not what we want to do. And that's where we start to begin to split from, as far as the preferences go, what we are really interested in.

свернуть