Adolfas Mekas
Actor · 1925 – 2011 · Semeniškiai, Lithuania
Adolfas Mekas (born on September 30th 1924 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania and died on May 31st 2011 in Poughkeepsie, New York) was a Lithuanian filmmaker, writer, director, editor, actor, educator and mentor. Adolfas Mekas collaborated with his brother Jonas Mekas to establish the seminal magazine Film Culture, and the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. He was associated with George Maciunas as well as the Fluxus art movement. His short films incorporate a comic and anarchic spirit, highlighted in his feature ‘Hallelujah the Hills’ (1963), which was featured at the Cannes Film Festival and is now classified as an American classic. Adolfas Mekas played a key role in the experimental film society, the ‘New American Cinema’ in the 1960s.
Movies15
Movie7.3DocumentaryAlso known as Walden, Jonas Mekas’s first diary film is a six-reel chronicle of his life in 1960s New York, interweaving moments with family, friends, lovers, and artistic idols. Blending everyday encounters with portraits of the avant-garde art scene, it forms an epic, personal meditation on community, creativity, and the passage of time.
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
1968 · 32 votes
Movie7.8DocumentaryA compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
Movie7.0DocumentaryJonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Birth of a Nation
1997 · 4 votes
Movie8.4DocumentaryA film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
1986 · 10 votes
Movie6.8DocumentaryExperimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
2011 · 12 votes
Movie7.3DramaBarbara, a young woman consumed by despair, contemplates suicide, while a man she meets in a church and a married couple struggle to persuade her that life is still worth living. Mekas’s film weaves this intimate drama into a larger reflection on alienation, politics, and the turbulence of early 1960s America.
Guns of the Trees
1961 · 18 votes
Movie8.0The film consists of continuous panning shots up a series of 367 human legs.
Up Your Legs Forever
1971 · 2 votes
Movie5.8DocumentaryA home movie by Adolfas Mekas and wife Pola Chapelle on their travels to Lithuania and Europe. It was filmed concurrently with the more highly regarded “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania” by Jonas Mekas, brother to Adolfas.
Going Home
1972 · 6 votes
Movie7.1DocumentaryDrawn from footage shot between 1949 and 1963, Jonas Mekas’s autobiographical diary film chronicles his early years in exile, capturing the struggle to build a new life in New York and his gradual discovery of a vibrant artistic community.
Lost, Lost, Lost
1976 · 24 votes
Movie5.3DocumentaryUnable to sleep, Jonas Mekas drifts through New York nights, moving between apartments, studios, galleries, bars, and clubs. Along the way he encounters friends and fellow artists—including Ken and Flo Jacobs and Yoko Ono—capturing an intimate mosaic of nocturnal encounters, reflections, and moments of community.
Sleepless Nights Stories
2011 · 7 votes
Movie6.9DocumentaryJonas Mekas weaves an elegiac diary film from his 1971–72 return to Lithuania, chronicling a visit to his birthplace of Semeniškiai after decades in exile. Blending personal memory with documentary observation, the film becomes both a portrait of homecoming and a meditation on displacement, family, and the passage of time.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
1972 · 46 votes
Movie10.0DramaArthouse portraiture of a disestablishmentarian during his six-year draft dodge.
Windflowers
1968 · 1 votes
Movie5.8Jonas Mekas zoomed in from a completely different angle for his Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel. This fake interview with ‘Lapland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs’ brings an outsider’s perspective to bear on the US war, and discusses with ironic perplexity if it might not be possible to kill off the Viet Cong more cheaply. For, whilst white students in the US primarily took issue with the war in South-eastern Asia, African-Americans remained predominantly concerned with their own situation. For them, daily discrimination at home and the Vietnam War were simply two faces of the same racist coin
Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel
1969 · 4 votes
Movie7.0ComedyCrimeA ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.
The Genius
1993 · 2 votes
Movie9.0Caldwell's pulp storytelling, proto-feminist stance and unabashed social dramatization of his characters are a distinct vision of the condition of women -- specifically working class women. His broadly drawn themes of small town hypocrisy and restrictive moral values contextualize the titular characters' struggle for sexual expression, stability and independence. Certain Women is a disconcerting parable that pays tribute to but also defies the 50s period style of Caldwell, opting for contemporary small town situations and cinematic style. This cautionary tale of four heroic yet ordinary women is fashioned out of the past but relies on observations of the present historical moment and its political reality.
Certain Women
2004 · 1 votes