Conversations with Filmmakers

In 1949 Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas arrived in Brooklyn via Germany and began making films. Mekas developed the genre of the film diary, documenting his daily observations over time. He became known as a tuning fork of the New York art scene and as one of the founders of American avant-garde cinema.

Between 1958 and 1977 he wrote the weekly “Movie Journal” column for Village Voice, consisting of numerous interviews with filmmakers from around the world. Conversations with Filmmakers is the first complete collection of these interviews with Mekas’s friends and peers from the world of cinema gathered in a single volume. Mekas also recorded many of these conversations on video, later selecting a still frame or photograph with his interlocutors to accompany each interview. The collection is enriched with correspondence and excerpts from scripts of films discussed in the interviews, and concludes with an index of the people appearing throughout the book.

Inside, readers will find conversations with Storm de Hirsch, Louis Brigante, Andy Warhol, Nico Papatakis, Albert and David Maysles, Peter Kubelka, Agnès Varda, Harry Smith, John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage and many others.