Born in Lithuania in 1922, Jonas Mekas was a poet and resistance worker against both the German and Soviet occupations during the Second World War. After some years in a German camp for displaced persons, he and his brother, Adolfas, also a filmmaker, immigrated to New York, where they later founded the journal Film Culture. Initially hostile to the American avant-garde, Mekas became its champion and spokesman in the 1960s. Throughout that decade he exerted great influence through Film Culture, his "Movie Journal" column in the Village Voice, and his founding of the Film-makers Cooperative (in 1962) to distribute independent films, and the Filmmakers Cinematheque (in 1963) as a New York showcase.His first film, Guns of the Trees, a 35-millimeter feature, describes aspects of Beat culture in New York through the lives of four fictional characters. It reflects his hopes, at that time, for the establishment of a feature-length narrative cinema on the model of the French and Polish "New Waves." By the time he made The Brig with his brother, directly filming Ken Brown's stage play in the Living Theatre Production as if it were a documentary, he had already shifted his energies to his ongoing cinematic diary. The diary had actually begun in the mid-1950s when he reached the United States, but it took the liberating inspiration of Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken for Mekas to acknowledge that his artistic talent was focused outside of the feature film tradition he had been espousing.The first installment of his Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, the nearly three-hour-long Walden, records his life, with numerous portraits of his friends and colleagues, in the mid-1960s. Its techniques are characteristic of the filmmaker's mature work: staccato, single-frame flashes, composed directly in the camera, are counterpointed to longer sketches of weddings, trips to the circus, meetings. Printed intertitles often occur. Long passages have musical accompaniment. The filmmaker repeatedly breaks in on the soundtrack to offer private reflections and aphorisms.In 1976 Mekas released Lost, Lost, Lost, another three-hour section of the megadiary. This time, he went back to his initial experiments with the camera, in a more conventional and leisurely style, to document the aspirations and frustrations of his life as an exile dreaming of the re-establishment of an independent Lithuanian republic. Bits of this material had already appeared in his masterly and moving Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, a three-part film made with the help of German television. The middle section of that film describes the emotional reunion of both brothers with their mother, then almost ninety years old, when they returned home for their first visit since the war. The film opens with a summary of Mekas's initial experiences in America and ends with a recognition of the impossibility of recovering the past, as he joins a group of his friends, mostly artists, in Vienna.That elegiac tone is sustained and refined in Notes for Jerome, the record of his visits to the estate of Jerome Hill, in Cassis, France, in the late 1960s, and edited after Hill's death in 1972. Mekas married Hollis Melton in 1974; their first child, Oona, was born the next year. Paradise Not Yet Lost, or Oona's Fifth Year deals with his family life, but continues the theme of lost childhood that permeates Mekas's vision. It is filmed in the style of Walden, as is In Between, which records the years between Lost, Lost, Lost and Walden.
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