Jonas Mekas, the Avant-Garde Filmmaker Who Tried to Tell the Truth

But in “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” Mekas returns to his rural hometown Semeniskiai after nearly 30 years, and the immersive installation makes you feel as if you’re there with him, drinking beer with Adolfas and their elderly mother. In “This Side of Paradise,” he teaches Jackie Kennedy’s children how to use a camera at Warhol’s house in Montauk, Long Island, and in “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty,” you sink into his gauzy love for his wife, Hollis, and their children, Oona and Sebastian. The multiple screens work especially well for “Requiem,” which Mekas was working on almost till the very moment of his death, at age 96, in 2019. In it, shots of trees and flowers in bloom, along with glimpses of TV news disaster footage, are set to the grand choral tones of Verdi’s “Requiem Mass” to seriously unnerving effect.

The challenge Mekas presents to a critic is that his overall project, as a founder of arts organizations, writer and fund-raiser as well as compiler of cinematic diaries, was really just to live as an artist. This was a familiar strategy in the postwar avant-garde among whom he found his community, one that comes out of the conviction that art isn’t about making objects or definitive statements so much as it is about approaching the world in a certain spirit. But it must also have been, as Taxter points out, a response to his feelings of dislocation, a way for a war refugee to construct a new identity for himself. And who can argue with wanting an identity?

That’s not to say no one’s tried. The historian Michael Casper has recently raised questions about Mekas’s conduct during World War II, and the way he may or may not have shaded his reminiscences of the period. (The fact that Mekas worked for a newspaper which, under Nazi occupation, published antisemitic propaganda, even as he retyped BBC news reports at the risk of his life, is included in the catalog’s chronology.) And Mekas himself makes many references to his own unreliability as a narrator and the inadequacy of any attempt to record or make sense of his life. In “Self Portrait,” he discusses this explicitly, and the diary films are full of ironic acknowledgments of their own artifice.

In the end, though, it’s Mekas’s refusal to impose any single narrative on his work that gives it its truth. What could be more honest than filming the world as it passes by and presenting the fragments exactly as they are?

Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running

Through June 5. The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212.423.3200; thejewishmuseum.org. Timed tickets are required and all visitors must wear face coverings. All visitors 5 and older must show proof of vaccination.