In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick! — 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 change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives… — Jonas Mekas Copy Share
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
