Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running
Film Production & Exhibition
2022
- Artist
- Jonas Mekas
- Venue
- The Jewish Museum, New York
- Dates
- February 18 – June 5, 2022
- Role
- Producer
PRODUCTION
A 288-minute, thirteen-channel projection installation for Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running, featuring twelve of Mekas’s seminal films spanning his life and career. Each film was divided into chapters of varying length and distributed across some or all of twelve custom-fabricated screens, so a single film could be experienced in an immersive, condensed form. Short-throw projectors and overhead directional speakers let each screen, or chapter, be experienced on its own while keeping the room in balance. The thirteenth channel was a program monitor showing which film was playing and a countdown to the next. MSP produced the installation, including the projection system and multichannel playback.
THE EXHIBITION
Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running was the first U.S. museum survey of the Lithuanian-born filmmaker, poet, critic, and institution-builder who helped shape the avant-garde in New York and beyond. Coinciding with the centennial of his birth, it surveyed his 70-year career through film, photography, and previously unseen archival materials.
Forced to flee Lithuania in 1944, Mekas spent five years stateless in a Nazi labor camp and displaced persons camps before emigrating to New York with his brother Adolfas in 1949. A penniless refugee, he became a central organizer, and later a prolific filmmaker, within the avant-garde. The relationship between exile and creativity, at the heart of his work, was the exhibition’s central theme.
Over seven decades, Mekas made 93 films and videos and co-founded the institutions that sustained experimental film: the journal Film Culture in 1954, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1962, and Anthology Film Archives in 1969. From 1958 to 1971 he wrote “Movie Journal,” the Village Voice’s first column on cinema. Between 1968 and 1971, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative presented its Avant Garde Tuesdays series at the Jewish Museum.
CREDITS
Curator: Kelly Taxter
Exhibition Design: Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb, New Affiliates
Video Editor: Andrew Pulaski
Systems Integrator: Stephen Canella
Graphic Design: Mark Owens
Lighting: Clint Ross Coller
Installation Photography: Dario Lasagni
Special thanks to Anthology Film Archives
PRESS
“An innovative retrospective of work by Jonas Mekas reveals the fundamental honesty of his “diary” films.”
The New York Times
“a bold departure from a typical museum installation.”
The Wall Street Journal