Photo
Francesco Ragazzi had a theory about Jonas Mekas. “In a way,” he said one morning in October, “everybody now can be Jonas Mekas.”
Mr. Ragazzi, 33, an art curator from Milan, was in town to assemble an exhibition of Mr. Mekas’s work at a fashion boutique on Madison Avenue, and he was noting the resemblance between the diary-based films Mr. Mekas started making in the 1970s and the social media that followed decades later.
“But,” he said, “there is only one Jonas Mekas still. So I think we need to ask ourselves why. Because I think if everybody will be Jonas Mekas one day, the world will be saved. We need to keep going in this direction, becoming Jonas Mekas.”
Mr. Mekas this year made progress toward a goal that has driven him since the start of the series: raising money to expand Anthology Film Archives, the nonprofit organization and theater he helped start in the 1970s.
On March 2, a crowd that included Greta Gerwig, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters and others bid nearly $2 million at an art auction to benefit the archives. Performing onstage, Patti Smith altered the lyrics to her biggest hit to “Because the night belongs to JONAS,” to big applause.
For Mr. Mekas it was a year of reckoning: how much money the organization still needs to raise ($6 million); how far was too far to travel at age 95 (Seoul, where he did not attend an exhibition of his work); and how to make ends meet in the coming years.
This last was a trickier matter. He could no longer afford the rent on his Brooklyn loft, he said. “I have to move to a cheaper place,” probably within a year, he said.
But Mr. Mekas put the disruption in perspective. His life has been nomadic since the 1940s, including years in Nazi labor camps and United Nations camps for displaced persons. Moving to a smaller place somewhere in Brooklyn was a hiccup.
“It’s a necessity and it’s realistic and I need to do it and you do it,” he said. “It’s nothing. This is just another stop, and there will be another stop.”
Mr. Mekas also published a book of anecdotes and autobiographical images this year, “A Dance With Fred Astaire,” named for a Yoko Ono and John Lennon movie in which Mr. Mekas and Mr. Astaire both make dancing cameos. Another five or six books were almost ready, and a couple of films still needed finishing. After that, he said, “I’d like to travel.”
For now, he said, “I’m thinking about resistance. What does it mean, resistance? What kind of resistance do we need today? Technology is now being used, much of it, for negative purposes. So to resist all what is happening negatively in humanity or technology is to develop the — O.K., this banal word, spiritual aspect.”
He remained sanguine, despite some reservations about current world leaders. Totalitarianism, in his experience, did not endure, whereas art, nature and the teachings of the saints all were as powerful as ever — they were what composed his life. He did not use the word optimistic, but he felt that solutions were more durable than problems.
“To go back and introduce into all the schools art, to cut down on sports but bring arts, philosophy back into all educational systems,” he said. “And that’s what’s being cut everywhere. And I think that’s one of the sad and tragic parts of where we are. Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”
So ends another year for four members of New York’s oldest old: not with a whimper, but with small joys to ease their aches. Each lost a little and moved a year closer to death, as we all did. But each welcomed another morning, the start of another year to come. All had beaten the odds just to get this far.
As Ms. Willig said, “You think we’ll make another year, you and me?”
An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of Helen Moses’ daughter. She is Zoe Gussoff, not Gusoff.
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar