{"id":3693,"date":"2017-09-20T20:34:00","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T19:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/?p=3693"},"modified":"2017-10-08T13:27:23","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T12:27:23","slug":"dokumenta-14-jonas-mekas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/?p=3693","title":{"rendered":"Documenta 14. Jonas Mekas. Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. 1\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jonas Mekas (BALi-Kinos 32)<\/a><\/strong> Lost Lost Lost (1949\u201363, edited 1976) Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland (1971\/1993)
\nPhotographs from the Wiesbaden and Kassel\/Mattenberg Displaced Persons Camps, 1945\u201348 (2012 and 2016) Thirty-six archival pigment prints 43.2 \u00d7 55.9 cm and 55.9 \u00d7 43.2 cm each; All works BALi-Kinos, Kassel<\/p>\n

Jonas Mekas, frame sequence from Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), 16 mm film, color and black-and-white, sound, 82 min.
\nhttp:\/\/www.documenta14.de\/en\/artists\/5572\/jonas-mekas<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00abIn the fifty-five years that I\u2019ve known Jonas Mekas, I have never seen him without a camera, ready to use. First it was a 16\u2009mm Bolex, then a series of video and digital recording devices. Today, most often, it\u2019s a mobile phone. Mekas refers to himself simply as a \u201cfilmer\u201d these days, rather than as a filmmaker. He never conceived of himself as a \u201cfilm director.\u201d Looking back at his enormous body of work in literature\u2014poetry, essays, journals\u2014and in film and photography, Mekas concludes that the form binding all of it together is the diary.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

He does not use words casually. As a teenager (born in 1922), Mekas was a published poet in his native Lithuania even before he picked up his first camera to photograph the occupying German army on parade. An officer snatched the camera from his hand; Mekas was fortunate not to be snatched himself. But soon after, he and his younger brother Adolfas, realizing that they were wanted men, fled the country, bound for university in Vienna. They were quickly arrested and sent to a German forced labor camp. After the war, they lived for four years in displaced persons camps, one of them in Kassel. Jonas kept a diary during this period, later published as I Had Nowhere to Go<\/em> (1991). He also acquired a still camera. The lens wasn\u2019t very sharp, but Mekas\u2019s eye was. His desire to bear witness\u2014to record daily life, not only so that he would remember but so that history would take notice\u2014began with photos of displaced people, waiting to return to their former lives or to begin life anew. Mekas could not go back to Lithuania, which, as he later wrote, had been \u201cawarded to the Soviet Union.\u201d The Soviets considered him as much a troublemaker as the Nazis had.<\/p>\n

Instead, Mekas chose New York, and within months of arriving had scraped together enough money to buy his first Bolex camera. As he could barely afford rent and food, he conserved his precious film stock, shooting in extremely short bursts\u2014just enough to capture the movement of time, to suggest how the present becomes memory. Or to put it another way, Mekas\u2019s many diary films, including the most poignant among them, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania<\/em> (1972) are testaments to the struggle to live as a visionary in the present moment, knowing that the mind\u2019s eye will always be suffused with the ghosts of the past.\u00bb<\/p>\n

\u2014Amy Taubin<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonas Mekas (BALi-Kinos 32) Lost Lost Lost (1949\u201363, edited 1976) Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) Reminiszenzen aus Deutschland (1971\/1993) Photographs from the Wiesbaden and Kassel\/Mattenberg Displaced Persons Camps, 1945\u201348 (2012 and 2016) Thirty-six archival pigment prints 43.2 \u00d7 55.9 cm and 55.9 \u00d7 43.2 cm each; All works BALi-Kinos, Kassel Jonas Mekas, frame … Continuer la lecture de Documenta 14. Jonas Mekas. Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. 1\/4<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-contemporain","category-artiste","category-documenta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3693"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4315,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3693\/revisions\/4315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lantb.net\/figure\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}