Jonas Mekas was born and raised in Lithuania. During World War II he was imprisoned in a German labor camp in Hamburg. Liberated, he spent several years wandering through displaced person camps and in 1949 emigrated with his brother Adolfas to the United States. He settled in Brooklyn, which became his home for the remaining part of his life. After the first few weeks in the US, with borrowed money, he bought a simple Bolex camera, with which he began to record everyday moments of his life. This is how his characteristic diary film technique was born. The diaries consist of interrupted, brief, silent scenes depicting friends gatherings, their children’s plays, out of town summer trips, etc. Mekas himself explains the origins of his cinematic style:

I had only bits of time which allowed me to shoot only bits of film. I said to myself, ‘Fine, very fine. If I don’t have time to devote 6 or 7 months to making a film, I won’t break my heart about it, I’ll film short notes, from day to day, every day if I can film one minute, I film one minute.

Today Mekas’s diary films have an enormous historical value. They portray the bohemian life of New York avant-garde of the 50s and 60s, including unique photographs of John Lennon and Yoko, Mick Jagger, John Cassavetes, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac and many, many more. Mekas has managed to capture in his movies the fleeting magic of those times. Shots, blurred and ripped, depict simple moments of everyday life, revealing to our eyes all the magic and beauty of this world. This is precisely what the title of one of his films is about: As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.

Equally important to his film output is Mekas’s activity outside of film. In 1954 he became editor in chief of Film Culture, the most important avant-garde cinema magazine in the world and a few years later, he co-founded Filmmakers Cooperative, an experimental film repository that functions until the present day.

The significance of Jonas Mekas for experimental cinema cannot be overvalued. Still active today, the artist can be regarded as a true example of incessant, unwavering artistic energy.