“The hygienic slickness of our contemporary films, be they from Hollywood, Paris, or Sweden, is a contagious sickness that seems to be catching through space and time. Nobody seems to be learning anything, either from Lumière or from the neorealists:… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
Some cameras are heavier and need to be on tripods. Others are small enough to hide in your pocket. There are places where you don't want to feel like you are disturbing anything, so I may use a camera like… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
I live, therefore I make films. I make film, therefore I live. Life. Movement. I make home movies, therefore I live. I live, therefore… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
I'm not so much in the future as always in the present. The future always takes care of itself. What I do now with… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don't just say, 'Oh,… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
The nature of the video camera really makes you focus on the present. Since I have always been a diarist filmmaker, not one who… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
In narrative cinema, a certain terminology has already been established: 'film noir,' 'Western,' even 'Spaghetti Western.' When we say 'film noir' we know what… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
An adventurer can always return home; an exile cannot. So I decided that my home would be culture. — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
Just as in writing, there are novelistic and sort of pedestrian ways of telling a story, to write a postcard with your little pocket… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
I myself saw the great works of Western civilization for the first time in my high school in Lithuania in bad black-and-white reproductions on… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
I'm working in a form of cinema that can be described, and has been described, as a diaristic form of cinema. In other words,… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
I'm a filmmaker, but my working procedures are different. All my basic structuring is done during the filming. You know, how long I keep… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share Image
