Adolfas Mekas
Also Known As: George Binkey
Biography: 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.
Department: Acting
Place of Birth: Semeniškiai, Lithuania
Birthday: September 30, 1925
Deathday: May 31, 2011
Adult: No
Gender: Male
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Known For:
Sleepless Nights Stories
Overview: Director Jonas Mekas travels through New York nights, through apartments, studios, backstage rooms, galleries, bars, and clubs. Encountering old acquaintances like Ken and Flo Jacobs, Yoko Ono, friends, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Mr. Mekas begins the film with the words 'I can't sleep.' Who hasn't been in this situation? Sleepy and yet wide awake at the same time, you find yourself in the world of those exhausted from the day's exertions, the drunk, the relaxed, the dancing, the brooding, the mourning, and the pensive.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2011-12-15
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Going Home
Overview: A 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.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1972-10-04
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Time & Fortune Vietnam Newsreel
Overview: Jonas 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
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1969-01-01
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An Interview with the Ambassador from Lapland
Overview: Adolfas starred in, directed, and edited this Vietnam comedy, produced by Pola Chapelle and shot by Jonas Mekas.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1967-01-01
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Windflowers
Overview: Arthouse portraiture of a disestablishmentarian during his six-year draft dodge.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1968-02-22
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365 Day Project
Overview: This exhibition focuses on Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project, a succession of films and videos in calendar form. Every day as of January 1st, 2007 and for an entire year, as indicated in the title, a large public (the artist's friends, as well as unknowns) were invited to view a diary of short films of various lengths (from one to twenty minutes) on the Internet. A movie was posted each day, adding to the previously posted pieces, resulting altogether in nearly thirty-eight hours of moving images.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-12-31
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Certain Women
Overview: Caldwell'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.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2004-03-10
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As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Overview: A 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.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2000-11-05
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He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
Overview: A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1986-02-22
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Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
Overview: A 1971–72 documentary film by Jonas Mekas. It revolves around Mekas' trip back to Semeniškiai, the village of his birth.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1996-08-30
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Guns of the Trees
Overview: A depressed woman, Barbara, is on the verge of suicide while a man she meets in a church and a married couple try to convince her that life is worth living.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1961-02-28
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Birth of a Nation
Overview: Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1997-08-06
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Underground New York
Overview: A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1968-01-01
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Journey to Lithuania
Overview: During the trip back to Lithuania, Jonas Mekas made Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, Adolfas Mekas made Going Home, while Pola Chapelle, Adolfas’ wife, made this Journey to Lithuania, which both Jonas and Adolfas said was the best of these three films.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1971-01-01
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A Matter of Baobab
Overview: International Cast of Actors: Jonas Mekas, from Lithuania, poet and film-maker; Louis Brigante, from Madagascar, poet and publisher; Storm De Hirsch, from Holland, poetess, seer and film-maker; Pola Chapelle, from Tierra del Fuego, singer and motel operator; Adolfas Mekas, from Lapland, basket weaver and film director; Contessa Angela Maria Andrecci di Castiglione, from Italy, opera singer.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1970-01-01
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Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
Overview: An epic portrait of the New York avant-garde art scene of the 60s.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2013-11-23
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Lost, Lost, Lost
Overview: Jonas Mekas adjusts to a life in exile in New York in his autobiographical film, shot between 1949 and 1963.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1976-09-14
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The Genius
Overview: A 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.
Genres: Comedy Crime Science Fiction
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1993-04-02
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3 Friends Singing (...in the Desert)
Overview: A short portrait of Jonas Mekas by filmmaker and veteran Jonas chronicler Peter Sempel.
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2019-01-01
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