Williamsburg, Brooklyn

Williamsburg, Brooklyn is a ‘diary-film’ by avant-garde legend Jonas Mekas, which documents his neighbourhood and its people from 1948 to 1951, and includes some footage from the 1970s. This film contains some of the first footage Mekas shot with the camera he bought on arrival in the US. There’s no grand dramatic narrative here, only the fleeting poetry of ordinary people caught in little everyday moments. Mekas (1922, Semeniskiai, Lithuania) lives and works in New York. In 1944, he and his brother Adolfas were imprisoned in a forced labour camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. At the end of 1949, he emigrated with his brother to the USA, settling in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in New York. Two weeks after his arrival, he borrowed the money to buy his first Bolex 16mm camera and began to record moments of his life. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s pioneering cinema 16, and he began screening his own films in 1953. He has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde film making, playing various roles: as a critic and writer, as the co-founder of what would become the Anthology Film Archives, and as a film maker (including famous diary films such as Lost, Lost, Lost (1975) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001). His newest work Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (2009) premières in the section Signals: Size Matters.