JONAS

A short portrait of and homage to the legendary filmmaker Jonas Mekas, generally considered as one of the major exponents of the avant-garde movement in the American cinematic landscape of the 1950s and ‘60s. Similarly to his great example Olivier Dekegel tries to translate the aesthetics of home movies into a personal and biographical style, shaped as intuitive film diaries and subjective rushes. Snippets of everyday life are tied together into a lively and intimate mosaic of impressions and souvenirs. The work of Mekas itself was an important signal of the fading divide between an ‘œuvre d’art’, a product of stylised imagination, and what might be described as an introverted and poetical registration of events. Indeed Mekas’s films marked off a new style of cinema, along the lines of what André Gide or André Malraux meant to literature.