Hello, my name is Justin the Clearer, and I'm here today with Will Sloan, and you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're talking about one of the titans of avant-garde cinema and just cinema appreciation itself.

Jonas Mekis.

Filmmaker, writer, poet, diarist, promoter, public figure, friend of everyone from Andy Warhol to

Jackie Kennedy, and somebody for whom all of these different occupations bled into each other.

Because while he made so many movies, his motion pictures don't necessarily get classified

with the Stan Brackages or even the Maya Dairns.

But film classes being able to talk about those filmmakers was helped immensely by Mekis' work.

Yeah, this is a man who fought obscenity charges when he was showing movies like

Jacksmith's Flaming Creatures or Jean-Gene's Ashanta Moore, the organizer of countless screening

series and retrospectives, and particularly importantly, the founder of

anthology film archives in Manhattan, which is probably the most important exhibition venue

for avant-garde and experimental film, although it also shows lots of other kinds of films.

Yeah, like Hong Kong movies.

That's right, Hong Kong movies.

But also just a man who

had his hands in lots of different films and activities. He operated the camera for Andy Warhol's

film of the Empire State Building. He wrote the incredibly influential column, movie journal

for The Village Voice from 1959 to the 1970s.

He founded Film Culture magazine. Like, he had so many hands in so many pots in ways that were

actually important to the history of film as we view it today. But I want to ask you, Will, why did you want to

pick him as a subject? Like, where did you learn about him and find that he was an important

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