For 70 years Jonas Mekas, widely seen as the godfather of American avant-garde film, created nearly daily visual documents that showed elements of his life.
He called them “film diaries.” They were recorded on film reels and tapes that were stored in cardboard sleeves with labels like “angry dog,” “small memorabilia” and “Warhol." Those were stacked throughout Mekas’s loft in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, organized in a way that only he fully understood.
After Mekas died in 2019 at 96, a re-creation of the cluttered loft was installed on the fifth floor of an arts center in New Jersey, including the recordings and other possessions: Mekas’s old film editing equipment. A cardboard box with trimmings from the beard of his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. A scarf he brought when fleeing his home country, Lithuania, in the 1940’s and held onto while surviving a Nazi labor camp.
In the summer of 2020, the filmmaker KD Davison started sifting through those archives to create a documentary about Mekas. That film, “Fragments of Paradise,” will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 13.
The documentary draws heavily from Mekas’s visual diaries, which Davison said seemed to reflect the rootlessness he experienced as a refugee during World War II and his enduring search for moments of beauty or calm.
“I began to see this melancholy that I think isn’t often associated with Jonas,” she said. “It was like watching someone through the course of their life reconcile themselves with loss and begin to find freedom and joy just in the present moment.”
“Fragments of Paradise” premiered at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, where it won the best documentary on cinema prize. Still, distributors were scarce, said two of the film’s executive producers, George and Teddy Kunhardt. Many documentaries have faced that problem over the past few years, in part perhaps because of consolidation and cost-cutting in the industry and a market driven by what one producer, Sara Archambault, described to the Harvard Law School Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law as “aversion to risk.”
The producers quietly released “Fragments of Paradise” in late December on the YouTube channel of a nonprofit foundation they run. They said in an email that they were thrilled that the Amazon release would bring a broader audience to the documentary.
Davison interviewed Mekas’s son, Sebastian Mekas, his daughter, Oona Mekas, and his ex-wife, Hollis Melton, while making “Fragments of Paradise.” She also interviewed the filmmakers Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters and Peter Bogdanovich.
The documentary sketches Mekas’s early life when he left Lithuania in 1944, opposed, in his telling, to both the Nazis and Soviets who had occupied the country; he then was imprisoned in a labor camp and spent time in several displaced persons camps in Germany. But it takes its shape from the years after Mekas arrived in New York City in 1949, where he bought a 16-millimeter Bolex camera and started the decades-long odyssey of recording himself and his surroundings.
“I’m just filming moments of life,” Mekas says in one segment in the documentary. “I do not know what makes me do it, but I have to do it.”
Davison met Mekas a few times in passing in the early 2000s. In the months after his death, she got to know Sebastian and Oona, who provided access to their father’s archive.
Oona said she was receptive to the documentary because Davison aimed to depict the complexity of her father’s life instead of focusing on him solely as “an icon” of the avant-garde.
“He was a poet and an immigrant and a refugee and a filmmaker and an observer of artistic life,” she said.
Mekas had gone back to some of the old segments during his lifetime, drawing from them to make collagelike feature-length films including “Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches)” and “As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty.” But the majority of his diary footage had never been seen by the public.
At Mana Contemporary, an art and performance center in Jersey City, where Sebastian Mekas had helped install the re-creation of his father’s loft as a temporary tribute to his life and work, Davison began going through material. She pored over Mekas’s handwritten notes detailing what was on certain tapes and watching others, often with no inkling of what she might find.
Some of what emerged was new even to Mekas’s family. One such segment, from 2005, showed him looking into his camera lens and asking in an anguished voice, “What was my life all about?” and adding: “My only friend is this camera.”
Ultimately, Davison reviewed about 1,000 hours of footage and transferred some 500 hours to a digital format. She then arranged that footage chronologically and thematically.
That gave her a road map for the use of Mekas’s film diaries in the documentary, she said. As she proceeded, she realized that it was “as if Jonas then was narrating his own story.”
One bit of footage shows issues of Film Culture magazine, which Mekas started in 1954 with his brother Adolfas, rolling from a printing press. Several of Mekas’s segments show the buzz of activity at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which he co-founded in 1961 to distribute little-known movies. Mekas was also the first full-time film critic for The Village Voice and helped found Anthology Film Archives, in addition to directing films including “Guns of the Trees,” a feature about the lives of two New York City couples, and “Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania,” about his eventual return.
A diary segment from the early 1990s shows Allen Ginsberg at a dinner party at the Manhattan loft where Mekas lived for decades before moving to Brooklyn. Ginsberg rhythmically taps a table as he intones: “I’m alone in the sky / Where there’s nothing to lose / The sun’s not eternal / That’s why there’s the blues.”
In another segment, Mekas theorizes that Andy Warhol used a camera to mask his withdrawn nature. “A shy person is not able to connect 100 percent,” Mekas says gazing into his own lens, adding that a camera is then “the chain that keeps you attached to the people around you.”
Davison said that the diarylike segments, in which Mekas spoke to the camera and shot footage as he walked around New York, are among the most revealing parts of his archive because “he was so open and vulnerable” in them.
“It’s almost like no one knew him as well as the camera knew him,” she said.
In one moment of openness, Mekas recalls that he and his brother were “full of doubts about civilization” by the time they got to the United States. “We loved you, world, but you did lousy things to us,” he says. Elsewhere in the film, he speaks about the first time he did “not feel alone in America.” Referring to Lithuania, he adds: “There was a moment when I forgot my home.”
In a 1990 segment, Mekas speaks about his days as a “displaced person” as he walks through the Lower East Side of Manhattan, noting that he had lived there and across the East River in Williamsburg after arriving in New York.
“There is a point somewhere where you don’t know anymore where your home really is,” Mekas says, turning the camera toward the river. “I think my real home is cinema.”