Hailed as “the godfather of American avant garde cinema”, Jonas Mekas led an extraordinary, multi-hyphenated career whose wide-ranging influence must have proved a challenge for a documentary to encompass. When Mekas arrived in New York as a Lithuanian exile in 1949, the first thing he bought was a Bolex camera. For the displaced immigrant, when language faltered images became a means of communication.
As Fragments of Paradise charts Mekas’s professional milestones – a critic, a film-maker, a curator, and so on – what emerges most movingly is his philosophy of creative togetherness. In founding Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and later on the Anthology Film Archives, Mekas succeeded in building a nurturing space for those forgotten by the mainstream. It’s the kind of community-oriented work reflecting the belief that, for him, the home is the cinema.
