The TFI Reframe Collection

Screening Room with Jonas Mekas

Dir. Robert Gardner

Jonas Mekas - filmmaker, film critic, archivist, poet, lecturer and curator - is one of the leading figures of American avant-garde film and video. Born in Lithuania, he immigrated to New York in 1949 after spending time in Nazi forced labor camps and displaced persons camps. In addition to his many narrative and diary films that have screened extensively at festivals and museums around the world, he has worked as editor-in-chief of Film Culture, movie critic for the Village Voice and co-founder of Anthology Film Archives, one of the world's largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. Jonas Mekas visited Screening Room in October 1981 to discuss the film preservation efforts of Anthology Film Archives and show and discuss his own work as well as films by other filmmakers, including Bruce Bailie, Maya Deren, and Joseph Cornell. Screening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner (Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss), who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard for many years. This unique program dealt even-handedly with animation, documentary, and experimental film, welcoming such artists as Jan Lenica, John and Faith Hubley, Emile DeAntonio, Jean Rouch, Ricky Leacock, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Yvonne Rainer and Michael Snow. Frequently, guests such as Octavio Paz, Stanley Cavell, and Rudolph Arnheim appeared as well. Nearly 100 programs were produced during the years Screening Room was broadcast. Recently, The Museum of TV and Radio in New York City offered to copy the two-inch master tapes that had been given to the Film Study Center.

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