To Get Out Of The Deep Black Night
21.03.2023, h 19.00
Jonas Mekas and New American Group
Non-academic lecture by Vincenzo Estremo
The New American Cinema Group was born in 1960 and involved all the independent directors who had signed the Manifesto by Jonas Mekas. The core of his thought is the clear ethic and aesthetic opposition to the Hollywood industry, together with the intention of creating an alternative distributing web, different from the major’s one. Mekas’ thought became one of the points of reference for art cinematography and for the evolution and rooting of moving images in the field of contemporary art.
Starting from the verse “To Get Out Of The Deep Black Night” of "Travel Songs” (1981), Vincenzo Estremo developed a research project aimed at investigating the role of Jonas Mekas in the creation of an internationalist film radicalism and a community trusteeship. After an year and a half of research in the archives of the Jonas and Adolfas Mekas Heritage Studies Center in Birzai and at the Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, Vincenzo Estremo describes the intricate past of the distribution of independent cinema, and supposes the future of moving images in contemporary art.
“To Get Out Of The Deep Black Night” is supported by the Italian Council, the Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea, Ministero della Cultura (10 ed., 2021).
JONAS MEKAS - BIOGRAPHY
Jonas Mekas (1922 Semeniškiai – 2019 New York) was a Lithuanian artist, poet, director and curator.
Together with his brother Adolfas, he escaped a nazi forced-labor camp and went to New York in 1949. After two months in the USA, Jonas Mekas bought his first Bolex camera and started to record brief moments of his life. In 1954 he founded the magazine “Film Culture” with Adolfas, and in 1958 he started the column “Movie Journal” on the newspaper “Village Voice”. In 1962 he began his activity at the Film Maker Cooperative and wrote the manifesto of the New American Cinema Group, while in 1964 he founded the Film Maker Cinematheque in SoHo which became the Anthology Film Archives in 1970. His work as a director is internationally recognized for his diarylike and experimental style. Mekas’ film "The Brig” won the Gran Premio Leone San Marco in 1964 for being the best documentary at the Venice International Film Festival. Among his many films, the following must be mentioned: "Walden” (1969), "Reminiscences of a Journey in Lithuania” (1972), "Lost Lost Lost” (1975), "Scenes from the life of Andy Warhol: friendships and intersections” (1990), "Scenes from the life of George Maciunas” (1992) and "Letter from Greenpoint” (2005). In 2007, a few months after YouTube was born, he created a series of 365 short films published on the Internet each day, and he kept sharing his new works on the website since then.
VINCENZO ESTREMO - BIOGRAPHY
Vincenzo Estremo is an international Ph.D. in media studies, cinema and communication at the Università di Udine and at the Kunstuneversität Linz. Currently, he is post-doc at the Quadriennale di Roma. In 2022 he was a researcher at the Film-Maker Cooperative in New York. He is a moving image theorist and he teaches trusteeship of exposed film and phenomenology at NABA in Milan. He is co-director of the publishing series "Cinema and Contemporary Art” (Mimesis International) and writes for Italy and International "Flash Art”. He published “Extended Temporalities. Transient Visions in Museum and Art” (Mimesis International 2016), "Albert Serra, cinema, arte e performance” (Mimesis Edizioni 2018), "Teoria del lavoro reputazionale” (Milieu Edizioni 2020). His second monograph will be published in 2023.