Jonas Mekas Quotes

For me, every film is an interesting experience.

When you watch my films, you're feeling my heart.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

I believe realism is nothing but an analysis of reality. Film scripts have a synthetical constitution.

Sure, you always put some of your own experience into a film.

I was very inspired by Les Blank's film 'Burden of Dreams.' I think what's unique about his film and the two I've made is that they're close examinations of filmmakers and how their own emotional experiences reflect in the material they're rendering, and vice versa - how that material sometimes colors their own lives.

Usually, I think, every film I've made has been a book, and I've always read it.

In the moment of making films, I want to share my observations of life, not of other films.

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

How do you capture the drama of a Rembrandt painting in a movie? How do you feel that moment that they captured in two hours? I kind of fell into it and at one point, I decided I wanted to live an art life; I wanted to tell stories. I came to New York, and did what most people do - you become a PA and run and get coffee and pay your dues and learn until your opportunity comes.

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physicals reality.

I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.

There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you.

I make films for myself, first and foremost, just because it is such a personal experience, and it's something I really have to want to do and feel connected to.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end to this type of filmmaking.

I write about what I want to write about, and so the film comes out as a very personal expression even if its subject matter is totally prefabricated.

You photograph with all your ideology.

From film to film, I realize my strengths and my weakness, and I realize how much better I get. I learn the lingo, I ask questions and I'm on set trying to figure out which shots they're going to use. For me, it's exploring the art. It's not just making a movie.

I don't really do too many interviews - I like creating and being visual, shooting videos and movies. I just like showcasing my skill and challenging myself.