By Furiodetti – Furio Detti, CC BY 3.0, Link

Filmmaker, poet, critic and philosopher Jonas Mekas passed away on January 23 at the age of 96. The wildly creative and willfully cantankerous Mekas was a champion of experimental cinema and a film critic whose taste and style was ahead of its time. Mekas is credited with getting Andy Warhol to try his hand at movie-making, and his feminist defense of Greta Gerwig’s Ladybird put the nearly-century old Mekas right in time with millenials and the Me Too movement. Mekas was a well known Lithuanian language poet, and a collaborator with Nico, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Yoko Ono and Salvador Dali. However he’s best remembered as a film curator and critic. Here’s the Wiki…

In 1954, together with his brother Adolfas Mekas, he founded Film Culture, and in 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for The Village Voice. In 1962, he co-founded Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde film. Along with Lionel Rogosin, he was part of the New American Cinema movement.

Days after his passing The Guardian published Mekas’ last interview. Here’s a taste of Mekas’ famous flair for creative camaraderie…

Perhaps most importantly, he opened up his loft to friends and fellow travellers in the avant garde. Here, any number of legendary – or soon to be legendary – artists met to watch endless films in which nothing happened, while discussing cultural possibilities. These included Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Salvador Dalí, Kenneth Anger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs. (Although he was firmly rooted in the counterculture, he had many establishment friends. Mekas taught the children of John and Jackie Kennedy to make films.)

It was at Mekas’s apartment that Warhol first became interested in film-making. “In my loft,” he says, “Andy met film-makers and was inspired by them. That’s where he got the bug. My loft was a gathering space for musicians, poets, film-makers.” Mekas helped Warhol shoot Empire, an eight-hour, slow-motion film of an unchanging view of the Empire State Building. He has little time for those who regard Warhol as merely a self-publicist. He didn’t seek out fame, says Mekas – it was the other way round.

“The newspapers began to attack him and it created a kind of fame. Then the society around him began to seek him out. Then everybody began to write and say, ‘Andy is only interested in those fake people, he only wants fame.’ But it was the reverse . He was never interested in them and, the more he ignored them, the more they flocked to him. Everybody could go into the Factory – and lost souls would come in because he never said no. Whatever they said, he acted like a good father. He just never said no.”

Read the rest of the interview here, and watch this great vid about Mekas, his life and work to find out more about the great man…

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Art critic, novelist, painter and poet John Berger died on Monday. Berger celebrated his 90th birthday last year and a BBC special and a very good documentary film marked the occasion. Here’s some of my Burnaway review for The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger. It’s followed by a YouTube playlist I made for my dear readers featuring the full four-episode run of Berger’s classic BBC series Ways of Seeing as well as another John Berger doc that aired on BBC 4 last year. If you loved Berger these make for a great remembrance. If you’re just now coming to the man and his work we’ve already got it all sorted for you…

Critic, poet, playwright, and artist John Berger prefers to call himself a “storyteller,” and The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger offers a quadrilogy of poetic sounds and images that each tell a different tale about Berger, the “radical humanist” who left urban London for the rural French Alpine village of Quincy in 1973 and never looked back.

Seasons is as much about the place Berger calls home as it is about the man himself. Berger’s bramble of tangled gray hair and the slow, natural grace of his gait down a gravel lane sometimes blur the separation between author and landscape. This documentary shares its sensual confusion of place and person with The Seer, an excellent portrait of Kentucky poet, philosopher, and farmer Wendell Berry that screened at the Nashville Film Festival back in April. The structure of the Seasons’ anthology also recalls experimental artist documentaries, such as Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and Paul Schrader’s biopic of the great Japanese poet, playwright, actor, director, and novelist, Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters.

The first portrait, “Ways of Listening,” is directed by Colin MacCabe and written by Tilda Swinton, and it features the actress and Berger in his studio looking at paintings, outdoors using shovels and a wheelbarrow to rescue his car from a snow drift, and in the kitchen preparing food, eating and talking at the table. The pair have a lot in common: Berger’s dad was a veteran of World War I, Swinton’s of World War II. They share a November 5th birthday, and they both agree that their decades-long friendship was arranged by themselves in a previous life. They share a great chat about history, silence, fathers, war and apples – it’s imaginatively shot, and the lo-fi images recall Derek Jarman. In fact, the Derek Jarman Lab partnered with Swinton in the making of the film.

The second portrait, “Spring,” unspools in the wake of the death of Berger’s wife Beverly. Conversely, it’s a chapter concerned with immortality – the kind that animals achieve through the perpetuation of a species. Berger reads from his own anthology About Looking in the narration: “Lion was lion. Cow was cow.” Director Christopher Roth’s crew also narrates these scenes, quoting Berger’s animal writings in voiceover or reading from Berger’s creature-centric works while addressing the camera directly. Add in a few comments about the political potential inherent in the spring season – the Prague Spring, the Arab Spring – and add some bold white titles and French pop music, and this chapter is a refreshingly irreverent Godardian exploration of what we might learn about time and consciousness through the eyes of the animals that we have both subjugated and worshipped.

Read the rest of the review by following the above link to the Burnaway site. In the meantime, here’s Berger on BBC…

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1965, 50 years ago, was a big year for Andy Warhol, the filmmaker: He met Edie Sedgwick who starred in one of his best films, that year’s Poor Little Rich Girl. He also began collaborating with Paul Morrissey who helped Warhol take his cinematic ambitions to another level. Things were going so well behind the camera that Warhol announced his retirement from painting — at least for a little while.

One good turn deserves another, and as we recognize this important period in the artist’s journey as a movie maven, here’s an epic, nearly four hour documentary about the man behind the soup can…

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This year we’re remembering the passing of Rosaleen Norton, 35 years ago in 1979. The infamous Australian occultist and artist lived the bohemian life of an artist in the red light district of Kings Cross, Sydney. Norton lived openly as a witch and created then-shocking paintings that found her demonized in the tabloids and targeted for harassment and censorship by the powers that be. However, it seems that Norton’s only real sin was being a strong-willed independent woman born decades ahead of her time.

Here’s the Wiki…

Rosaleen Miriam “Roie” Norton (2 October 1917 – 5 December 1979), who used the craft name of Thorn, was an Australian artist and occultist, in the latter capacity adhering to a form of pantheistic / Neopagan Witchcraft which was devoted to the god Pan. She lived much of her later life in the bohemian area of Kings Cross, Sydney, leading her to be termed the “Witch of Kings Cross” in some of the tabloids,[1] and from where she led her own coven of Witches.

Her paintings, which have been compared to those of British occult artist Austin Osman Spare, often depicted images of supernatural entities such as pagan gods and demons, sometimes involved in sexual acts. These caused particular controversy in Australia during the 1940s and 50s, when the country “was both socially and politically conservative” with Christianity as the dominant faith and at a time when the government “promoted a harsh stance on censorship.” For this reason the authorities dealt with her work harshly, with the police removing some of her work from exhibitions, confiscating books that contained her images, and attempting to prosecute her for public obscenity on a number of occasions.

According to her later biographer, Nevill Drury, “Norton’s esoteric beliefs, cosmology and visionary art are all closely intertwined – and reflect her unique approach to the magical universe.” She was inspired by “the ‘night’ side of magic”, emphasising darkness and studying the Qliphoth, alongside forms of sex magic which she had learned from the writings of English occultist Aleister Crowley.

Check out this intense slide show featuring snaps of Norton and her diabolical art…

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Controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s work is still catching eyes 25 years after his death in March, 1989. Mapplethorpe was practically the subject of Patti Smith’s outstanding memoir, Just Kids and the artist’s work is currently featured in two new exhibitions. In an article titled “The Resurgence of Robert Mapplethorpe,” T explains:

Two high-profile exhibitions are breathing new life into the work of a famous art provocateur. Here, the curator Clarissa Dalrymple, Mapplethorpe’s dear friend, recalls one of his many controversial images.

‘‘As above, So below’’ is on view Feb. 28 to March 29 at Ohwow, 937 N. La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles; oh-wow.com. ‘‘Robert Mapplethorpe’’ is on view from March 26 to July 13 at the Grand Palais, 254/256, rue de Bercy, Paris; grandpalais.fr.

Here is a clip from a BBC documentary about Mapplethorpe which features footage from his influential, early art film Robert Having his Nipple Pierced…

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I’m planning to cover the Nashville International Film Festival for a variety of papers and blogs again this year. One of the films I’m most excited about is The Voice Thief by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s son, Adan who played the young boy in Santa Sangre.

Here is a profile of Adan who is a musician in Mexico City. It includes an conversation between Adan and his brother Christobel who is a painter and also a Tarot healer like his old man. Christobel suggests that today “avant garde” means an “art that can heal the world.”

Amen.

Enjoy!

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On this episode of the BBC’s The Culture Show, graphic novelist Alan Moore takes us on a personal tour of magician/occultist Austin Osman Spare’s old neighborhood — stopping in the pubs where the artist showed his magical/grotesque works, and strolling a gallery exhibition of Spare’s mysterious portraits, nudes and still lifes.

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