Jonas Mekas—the highly influential Lithuanian-American filmmaker, whose avant-garde work captured and in turn helped shape the New York City art scene and culture of the 1960s and 1970s—has died, as the Associated Press reports. He was 96 years old.
Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was a refugee who survived early adult years in a Nazi labor camp during World War II. He came to the United States via the UN Refugee Organization in 1949, settling in Brooklyn. Not long afterwards, he began using a camera to document “brief moments of his life” and quickly became a filmmaker. He and his brother co-founded Film Culture magazine in 1954, which published until 1996. Around that time, he became friends with all sorts of figures in the burgeoning New York art community, including Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, La Monte Young, and others.
Mekas shot the Velvet Underground’s first-ever public performance in 1964, with his film being the only video evidence of that debut show. Throughout the course of his life, Mekas would make hundreds of films and videos, shooting video portraits of artists including John Lennon and Yoko Ono (capturing the couple during their iconic “Bed-Ins for Peace”), Patti Smith, Sonic Youth, Andy Warhol, and many others. By the time of his passing, Mekas was regarded by many as the “godfather” of avant-garde cinema.
