Curator

Erik Viskil

Erik Viskil (Netherlands) is a researcher, writer, and a film enthusiast. He is a former member of the board of directors of Rietveld academie and founding-coordinator of its department of Image & Language.

For this program Erik Viskil has invited:

Guests

Gideon Bachmann

(Germany) is a writer, critic, interviewer, photographer and filmmaker. He met Jonas Mekas in the film classes of Hans Richter at the City College in New York. When Bachmann started the Group for Film Study Jonas Mekas joined him and they worked together for some time. Bachmann directed two documentary films in which he portrayed his friend: Jonas (1967) and Underground (1967). Gideon Bachmann is a well-known moderator 
of discussions and press conferences at international film festivals.

Pip Chodorov

(USA) is a filmmaker, distributor, historian, and friend of Jonas Mekas 
from a younger generation. His Paris-based publishing company ‘Re:Voir’ specializes in avant-garde cinema. He brought out several films by Jonas Mekas on DVD and published a number of his books. Together with Christian Lebrat he is the editor of an elaborate analysis and handbooks on Mekas’s films Walden: Diaries Notes and Sketches, and Lost Lost Lost. His most recent project is a documentary on the history of experimental filmmaking, with the appropriate title Free Radicals (2010).

Sarah Payton and Chris Teerink

(USA and Netherlands) are filmmakers based in Amsterdam. In 2002 they spent six weeks with a camera in and around the Anthology Film Archives in New York. They captured the daily life of Jonas Mekas and talked with him about his views on film and filmmaking. Their documentary In the Shadow of the Light, which evolved out of the project, was launched at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2007.

P. Adams Sitney

(USA) is a Fellow of the American Academy of Berlin and Professor of Visual Arts at Princeton University. He first met Jonas Mekas at the age of 17, and they became close friends and collaborators. He appears in several of Jonas Mekas’s films. They co-founded the Anthology Film Archives in 1970. His ‘Visionary Film’ (1974) is the first major written history of American avant-garde film. In ‘Eyes Upside Down’ (2008) he gives a detailed analysis of Jonas Mekas’ filmmaking, which he describes as the poetry of everyday life.