Adolfas Mekas (30 September 1925 – 31 May 2011) was a Lithuanian-born American filmmaker, writer, director, editor, actor and educator. With his brother Jonas Mekas, he founded the magazine Film Culture, as well as the Film-Makers' Cooperative and was associated with George Maciunas and the Fluxus art movement at its beginning. He made several short films, culminating in the feature Hallelujah the Hills in 1963, which was played at the Cannes Film Festival of that year and is now considered a classic of American film.
Early life
Mekas was born on a farm in Semeniškiai, Lithuania, the son of Elzbieta (Jašinskaitė) and Povilas Mekas. His sister was Elžbieta and brothers were Povilas, Petras, Kostas and Jonas. Adolfas was the youngest in the family.
At 14 years old, while still in Lithuania, Mekas saw his first film, Captain Blood starring Errol Flynn. In July 1944, Adolfas and his brother Jonas fled the approaching Red Army, going West in an attempt to reach neutral Switzerland, holding fabricated student papers from the University of Vienna. Their train was redirected and they spent eight months in a forced labor camp near Hamburg,
Early years in the United States
In the spring of 1950 he purchased a 16mm Bolex camera and took up photography. At the same time, he wrote more than 50 scripts and attended film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, Cinema 16, Thalia, Stanley, and other venues. He supported himself with a variety of jobs, including washing dishes and working as a foreman in a Castro Convertible factory. He was drafted into the United States Army during the Korean War, where he was assigned to the Signal Corps, and sailed for France in September 1951. On his return to the United States from Europe in 1953, he continued writing and filming and also began organizing the American Film House, along with his brother Jonas. Though the brothers approached many independent filmmakers, none were interested in collaborating on the project. They continued looking for a location in Manhattan for over a year, without success. In 1954 they abandoned the idea of the American Film House and with the money they had borrowed for the project started a film society, which they called the Film Forum. Mekas wrote of the period "We showed films at public schools and at Carl Fischer Hall on 57th Street, wherever we could, until we went bankrupt in the middle of the second film series later in the year just in time to start Film Culture magazine, the first issue of which came out in December 1954." ABC-TV's Wild World of Sports, and a few TV musicals. He was encouraged by Howard Hausman of the William Morris Agency, who had seen promise in Hallelujah the Hills and had made more than a few attempts at getting Mekas's scripts into the hands of independent producers who would understand their style. Although three of his screenplays remained under consideration at Warner Brothers for a few years, none were ever produced.
In 1967, with a very tight budget, Adolfas made a 16mm black-and-white film from his own script, Windflowers, Elegy for a Draft Dodger. Dominique Noguez in Cahiers du Cinéma wrote "....No frills, no Gipsy violin effects, no second movement of Aranjuez's concerto – and it is thereby, poignant. It is the other side of Vietnam. The stubbornness of a silent young man who is running away....who simply wanted to live."
Shortly after the completion of Windflowers, Adolfas was contacted by Governor Harold E. Hughes of Iowa and his staff. After an interview with the Governor, he was given the job of creating promotional commercials for Hughes's campaign for the United States Senate. He had no experience in the genre, but the challenge was enticing and he spent the summer of 1967 filming Hughes as he stumped the Iowa cornfields. He produced 35 TV commercials for Hughes's election campaign, which was ultimately successful.
In 1968 Mekas wrote, directed, and starred in a 3-minute short entitled Interview with the Ambassador from Lapland. It was photographed by Jonas, with assistance from Shirley Clarke on sound. It was produced by Pola Chapelle. Noguez wrote "In these 3 minutes Mekas is Swift, the horrible and admirable Swift of the 'Modest Proposal.' One really must admit that Mekas has made the USA a bit less loathsome." (Note that Jonas sometimes claimed authorship of this short film, calling it the Time Life Vietnam Newsreel.)
In 1969 Mekas photographed and edited Fishes in Screaming Water a catfilm produced by Pola Chapelle for the First International CatFilm Festival – INTERCAT '69 – which she founded. For the 2nd International Catfilm Festival in 1973, he made the award-winning How to Draw A Cat.
He edited and subtitled Companeras and Companeros in 1970. This was a feature documentary, shot in Cuba by David and Barbara Stone. He edited three versions, one for United States release, one for European release, and one for Cuban release. The same year he cut and edited a film by Yoko Ono, 360 legs, in "Up Your Leg."
In 1972, assisted by Pola Chapelle, Mekas completed an autobiographical film that documented his return to Lithuania after a 27-year absence. Going Home was invited to the New York Film Festival and many other festivals that year. It was part of the Conference on Visual Anthropology at Temple University in 1974 and was chosen by the Museum of Modern Art to be screened in its Anthropological Cinema exhibit, which toured internationally from 1975 to 1977.
The Bard Years
thumb|right|275px|Grave of Adolfas Mekas at [[Bard College cemetery in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York]]
On 3 July 1971, Mekas received a teaching contract from Bard College. Soon after, he began organizing the new Film Department. At first denied tenure, he began a campaign believing that, if he were given tenure, the Film Department itself would be tenured. Armed with letters from colleagues in the film world and former students, he was successful, and in 1979 was granted tenure. Mekas, Chapelle, and their son Sean Mekas, an Upstate New York artist, moved to the Hudson Valley, where Adolfas dedicated himself to teaching. Adolph's, a nearby pub also known locally as "Down The Road", became their after hours seminar room.
Only a very small budget was available to the Film Department, and it continued as the "orphan in the storm" for many years. Mekas was not discouraged and rented a truck to visit film friends in New York City once a year with Pola. They looked in their friends' labs for reels, split reels, cores, viewers, projectors and occasionally a moviola, which they took back to the Bard College Film Center. The lack of proper funding of the department worked to energize Mekas and his students in innovative ways. For instance, to raise funds for senior projects in film he held lunchtime auctions outside the dining commons on campus. The film department was small - more than three graduates was rare in the early years – but it was active and visible. During his years as chairman, Adolfas brought to the Bard Film Department some of the most noted independent and experimental filmmakers, including, Bruce Baillie, Ernie Gehr, Andrew Noren, Barry Gerson, Peter Hutton and Peggy Ahwesh and film historians and theorists Paul Arthur, P. Adams Sitney. John Pruitt, and guest faculty – friends including Ken Jacobs, Sidney Peterson, Shirley Clarke and George Kuchar. The Bard Film Department grew in stature and became well-respected.
P. Adams Sitney writes, "what came to be known as the People's Film Department was [Mekas's] theater of hijinks; he surprised even himself with his enormous didactic gifts, his startling administrative skill and his unceasing fount of comic invention. His own fractured education and his nearly total disregard for academic decorum made him the ideal professor. Nowhere in the archive of film is there an invented character who could come near the brilliant, lovable, outrageous mischief that consistently turned his classrooms into arenas of magic. He taught generations how to see and act."
In the summer of 1971, while visiting Italy after his first trip back to the home he had left behind in Lithuania, Mekas had a vision of St. Tula. In Porto Santo Stefano, when he first saw her representation, it was clear that she was the Patron Saint of Cinema. He had no name for her at the time, but took a photo and displayed it in the Film Department. Shortly after, written under her photo in the Carriage House, was seen "St. Tula loves your film. Even if no one else does." The name stuck and an altar was built. Sometime later the "Sayings of St. Tula" was published.
In addition to chairing the Film Department and teaching film courses until 2004, in 1981 he co-founded the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and directed the MFA program from '83 to '89. He also taught film courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and was a visiting lecturer at many institutions around the country.
Adolfas Mekas died in the early morning of 31 May 2011.