Jonas Mekas: poetics and practice of "cinema-journal"

Abstract

Jonas Mekas is a fundamental name of independent cinema: Lithuanian expatriate in New York at the late 40’s, he founded the Film Culture magazine and published an important column in the Village Voice, from where he would promote the most daring and radical cinema of his time. This paper analyses his cinematographically practice, for whom he’s perhaps the most important cinema-journal filmmaker, which will be distinguished here from the biographical cinema through his different ways of treating cinema and video, his corporal presence in the images and the role of editing and narration through his work.