Jonas Mekas.

Jonas Mekas, the godfather of american independent cinema, is an amazing old man. Yesterday i discovered his website www.jonasmekas.com by accident while i was doing research about some Andy Warhol Factory stuff.

The website was just launched in november and contains a collection of 40 short films by 84-year-old Jonas Mekas. All 40 short films, very rare and up to now hard to get material (e.g. one of the only existing live performances of The Velvet Underground) are available for download –in handy ipod format or for burning on a DVD for just a few dollars– and according to him this will be “…one of the most exciting venues for independently working film and video makers that has become available.” Grab it while you can!

He is also planning a web projekt of 365 short films that will be launched January 1, 2007. Also guest filmmakers, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, Martin Scorsese, and Able Ferrara will be contributing with new short films. Some of them are already on the website! You see, also old people can cope with new technologies! :-) And its even more amazing to watch his lifelong vision to ‘Free the Cinema’ becoming real through this website.

For those of you who doesn’t know who he is and what he does: Jonas Mekas, born 1922 in lithuania, is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He was the founder of The Anthology Film Archives (1970) and The Film-makers’ Cooperative (1962).

In the 60s he was one of the first people screening non-commercial avantgarde films without any censorship in New York City. The Film-makers’ Cooperative contains more than 12.000 movies and videos and The Anthology Film Archives is the world’s largest collection of paper materials documenting the history and practice of american and international avant-garde/independent film and video. After six decades of work, he has become internationally known for his deeply personal films that often have a diaristic and autobiographical approach.

Jonas Mekas still lives and works in New York.