NEW YORK, NY.- A Lithuanian refugee who landed in New York City in 1949 at the age of 27, Jonas Mekas became a founder of Film Forum, Film Culture magazine and Anthology Film Archives. He was the first full-time critic at The Village Voice, writing about film, and a widely published poet. But he also made scores of collagelike “diary” films that documented his busy, art-filled life.

The first of these films, in 16-millimeters, “Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches),” was shot between 1964 and 1969 and combines New York crowd scenes, circus performances and fragments of Mekas’ daily life with events like the first public appearance of the Velvet Underground, at a psychiatric convention, or John Lennon and Yoko Ono performing a “Bed-In for Peace.” When “Walden” premiered in 1969, Mekas encouraged viewers to walk in and out of the screening, though he also provided a detailed timeline in case anyone wanted to be sure of catching the convention (Reel 2, Minute 15) or Bed-In (Reel 4, Minute 35).

The effect of all this can be dizzying, but in a way, that’s to be expected. As eagerly as Mekas dove into his new life after the war, he never stopped feeling like an exile, and for all their intimacy, his films of New York also have a strange quality of self-consciousness or distance.

“Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running,” at the Jewish Museum, is Mekas’ first U.S. museum survey, and its curator, Kelly Taxter, approached her daunting and overdue task by mounting a kind of high-speed retrospective projected on a dozen free-standing screens. “Walden” normally runs three hours, but here its six reels all play at once, on multiple screens, in 36 minutes. (The soundtracks of these different reels, made up mostly of music and street noise, mesh together pretty well, but when there is speech, it’s subtitled.) With the exception of one unusually short piece from 2010, all the films in the exhibition are broken up similarly, so that the full program of 11, most of them originally feature-length or longer, takes just three hours.

Most of these 11 works are also diary films — abstract kaleidoscopic records of Mekas, his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, and the SoHo bohemians and Lithuanian transplants of their circle as they listened to folk music, visited Andy Warhol, drank wine, protested nuclear arms beneath the “Alma Mater” statue at Columbia University, gazed into the camera in front of turning carousels, played steel pans in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or dressed up for weddings and baptisms.

And since the point of all this, even more than documenting the variety of Mekas’ life in particular, is to capture the magical incongruity of life in general, Taxter’s inspired staging may even make the work more effective. Among other things, it opens it up to a whole new range of accidental juxtapositions. At one point, I became impatient with Reel 4 of “Walden,” torn between my compulsion as a viewer to look for some narrative sequence and yet another disconnected shot of someone walking through the snow. But then Mekas’ voice rang out from a screen to my left: “They tell me I should be searching,” he said, “but I am only celebrating what I see.” Then he began to play his accordion and sing: “I am searching for nothing, I am happy.”




Of course the multiscreen treatment doesn’t work for everything. The only film in the show that uses actors, “Guns of the Trees” (1962), is also nonlinear, but because it looks more like a conventional feature, Taxter’s conceit feels more disruptive. And “Self Portrait,” from 1980, consists largely of a single view of Mekas, so breaking it into multiple pieces turns a winsome improvised monologue about identity, art and exile into an overwhelming barrage.

But in “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” Mekas returns to his rural hometown Semeniskiai after nearly 30 years, and the immersive installation makes you feel as if you’re there with him, drinking beer with Adolfas and their elderly mother. In “This Side of Paradise,” he teaches Jackie Kennedy’s children how to use a camera at Warhol’s house in Montauk, Long Island, and in “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty,” you sink into his gauzy love for his wife, Hollis, and their children, Oona and Sebastian. The multiple screens work especially well for “Requiem,” which Mekas was working on almost till the very moment of his death, at age 96, in 2019. In it, shots of trees and flowers in bloom, along with glimpses of TV news disaster footage, are set to the grand choral tones of Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” to seriously unnerving effect.

The challenge Mekas presents to a critic is that his overall project, as a founder of arts organizations, writer and fundraiser as well as compiler of cinematic diaries, was really just to live as an artist. This was a familiar strategy in the postwar avant-garde among whom he found his community, one that comes out of the conviction that art isn’t about making objects or definitive statements so much as it is about approaching the world in a certain spirit. But it must also have been, as Taxter points out, a response to his feelings of dislocation, a way for a war refugee to construct a new identity for himself. And who can argue with wanting an identity?

That’s not to say no one’s tried. The historian Michael Casper has recently raised questions about Mekas’ conduct during World War II, and the way he may or may not have shaded his reminiscences of the period. (The fact that Mekas worked for a newspaper which, under Nazi occupation, published antisemitic propaganda, even as he retyped BBC news reports at the risk of his life, is included in the catalog’s chronology.) And Mekas himself makes many references to his own unreliability as a narrator and the inadequacy of any attempt to record or make sense of his life. In “Self Portrait,” he discusses this explicitly, and the diary films are full of ironic acknowledgments of their own artifice.

In the end, though, it’s Mekas’ refusal to impose any single narrative on his work that gives it its truth. What could be more honest than filming the world as it passes by and presenting the fragments exactly as they are?

Event Information:

Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running: Through June 5. The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; 212-423-3200; thejewishmuseum.org. Timed tickets are required and all visitors must wear face coverings. All visitors 5 and older must show proof of vaccination.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.