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foreword by peter bogdanovich second edition mov ie journa l the rise of the new american cinema, 1959-1971 jonas mekas edited, with an introduction, by gregory smulewicz-zucker movie journal FILM AND CULTURE FILM AND CULTURE A series of Columbia University Press EDITED BY JOHN BELTON For a list of titles in this series see page 455 jonas mekas FOREWORD BY PETER BOGDANOVICH movie journal second edition the rise of the new american cinema, 1959–1971 edited, with an introduction, by gregory smulewicz-z ucker AND A NEW AFTERWORD BY JONAS MEKAS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup . columbia . edu Copyright © 2016 Jonas Mekas Film still on page 159: Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964. 16mm fi lm, black and white, silent, 8 hours 5 minutes at 16 frames per second. Copyright © 2015 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Mekas, Jonas, 1922- author. | Smulewicz- Zucker, Gregory R., 1983- editor. Title: Movie journal : the rise of the new American cinema, 1959–1971 / Jonas Mekas ; foreword by Peter Bogdanovich ; edited, with an introduction, by Gregory Smulewicz- Zucker, and a new afterword by Jonas Mekas. Description: Second edition. | New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] | Series: Film and culture | Selections from the author’s column Movie journal published in the Village voice. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2015042439| ISBN 9780231175562 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231175579 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541589 (e- book) Subjects: LCSH: Motion pictures— United States. | Experimental fi lms— United States— History and criticism. Classifi cation: LCC PN1993.5.U6 M35 2016 | DDC 791.430973— dc23 LC rec ord available at http:// lccn . loc . gov / 2015042439 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid- free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Jason Gabbert References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Contents FOREWORD: THE GREAT MR. MEKAS VII PETER BOGDANOVICH INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION IX GREGORY SMULEWICZ- ZUCKER Introduction 1 (cid:2) 1 1959 7 (cid:2) 2 1960 15 (cid:2) 3 1961 29 (cid:2) 4 1962 52 (cid:2) 5 1963 83 (cid:2) 6 1964 118 (cid:2) 7 1965 181 (cid:3) VI CONTENTS (cid:2) 8 1966 230 (cid:2) 9 1967 271 (cid:2) 10 1968 310 (cid:2) 11 1969 336 (cid:2) 12 1970 372 (cid:2) 13 1971 416 AFTERWORD 427 APPENDIX 429 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 437 INDEX 439 Foreword THE GREAT MR. MEKAS PETER BOGDANOVICH Jonas Mekas is a true revolutionary. While he most famously cham- pioned the avant- garde fi lmmakers of the world in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, etc., he was also quite open to standing up for their abso- lute opposite. I remember, in the early 1960s—w hen Dan Talbot started reviving classic American movies at his New Yorker Theatre (now gone, alas), up in the theatre’s little offi ce, Jonas used a thick marker to write on the wall: “The best movies were made in Hollywood!” It reminds me of an exchange between Marlon Brando’s character in The Wild One, and Mary Murphy’s character, who asks him: “What are you rebelling against?” Brando answers: “What d’ya got?” Yes, Jonas is a revolutionary. He is a great believer in the importance of all fi lm culture; in fact, he named his revolutionary, polemical, forward- and backward- looking magazine Film Culture. It was extremely infl uen- tial, a kind of American Cahiers du Cinéma, and kept alive by constant fundraising done mainly by Jonas himself. At his priceless Anthology Film Archives, he has as much of fi lm culture as he can get. There is already an extraordinary collection of books on cinema, and, of course, thousands of fi lms. This is part of Jonas’s legacy and a great gift to Manhattan, and the world. But then, mainly, besides being a born revolutionary, Jonas is a poet. He has a poet’s eye. Just look at the lengthy personal-j ourney pictures he has made, and you can very clearly see his humanist, melancholy, some- times whimsical, always engaging personality and par ticu l ar vision. Of course, he often writes like a poet, too. (cid:3) VIII FOREWORD For many years, Jonas had a column in the Village Voice called, “Movie Journal.” It became a fi xture for hip fi lm people. (Much of it is collected in this book.) Now remember, in that column, Jonas was the fi rst to champion the brilliance of John Cassavetes, with John’s fi rst feature as a direc- tor, Shadows (1959), the earliest fl ash of the new Hollywood that really took over in the later 1960s, the fi rst Indie. It is no coincidence, either, that Cas- savetes was one of precious few poets in American cinema. Maybe it takes a poet to spot a poet. As a friend for de cades now—we met around 1958— Jonas has always been encouraging to me, before I had even directed my fi rst off - Broadway production in 1959. In fact, in the summer of 1961, Jonas and his dear brother Adolfas drove all the way from Manhattan to Phoenicia, N.Y. (upstate near Kingston and Woodstock) to see my production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. When I wrote pieces for Film Culture, I told Jonas I had to be paid something (a lot of material was done gratis b ecause it was a non- profi t magazine), and he always did. Since I was living hand to mouth, that meant a lot. Jonas has meant a lot to a great many people. He has pointed the way to good art in motion picture making, with an eclectic viewpoint. He has made some beautiful contributions to that rarely attempted genre of fi lm as memoir. And all his eff orts, all his writings, have been to preserve and protect and pop u lar ize fi lm as an art form to be taken seriously. Introduction to the Second Edition GREGORY SMULEWICZ- ZUCKER On the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, several friends and collabora- tors (myself included) were asked to write short appreciations of Jonas Mekas’s contributions to the arts. Mekas’s colleague, the fi lm theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney, struck upon the probl em of assessing Mekas’s work in the brief space granted us: Mekas has played a variety of roles that evade easy summary.1 He is a fi lmmaker, poet, fi lm critic, curator, and the cofounder of a journal (Film Culture); a fi lm distribution organ ization (the Film- Makers’ Cooperative); and a library, museum, and theater (Anthology Film Archives). Setting aside his status as one of Lithuania’s foremost poets,2 Mekas is the single most impor tant defender and promoter of the American avant- garde cinema movement, which gradually came into existence from the 1950s to the 1970s. This movement included fi lmmakers such as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Gregory Marko- poulos, Marie Menken, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, as well as Mekas himself. Unfortunately, no one has yet undertaken the major task of producing a rigorous study covering the full scope of Mekas’s life and work. This would provide a much- needed critical assessment of his place as an artist and as a champion of the avant- garde in the United States.3 This volume and introduction, however, has a more circumscribed goal. The purpose of the volume is to make Mekas’s long out- of- print 1971 collection of his pieces as the fi lm critic for the Village Voice— Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema—a vailable to a new generation of fi lm students, scholars, and lovers. The aim of this introduction is to suggest why it is impor tant to continue reading Mekas’s column forty years after he stopped writing it.