Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World

Abstract

The World of Avant-Garde Film. Jonas Mekas is a central figure in the consolidation of the postwar avant-garde film community. His life and work are dedicated to the establishment of film as an art form. In this endeavor, he has collaborated in the construction-of an art world, as defined by sociologist Howard Becker. In Worlds, Becker develops his institutional theory of art: Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of art worlds coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artifacts. The same people often cooperate repeatedly, even routinely, in similar ways to produce similar works, so that we can think of an art world as an established network of cooperative links among participants.2 The avant-garde film community may be thought of as an art world, a subset of the larger contemporary art world in the United States. As a critic, journal editor, distributor, filmmaker, exhibitor, fundraiser, archivist, and teacher, Mekas has fought to place film on equal footing with the other arts of modernism. Through his writings, lectures, and films, Mekas has worked to build a community of filmmakers and a sophisticated audience receptive to their art. I will explore Mekas's contribution to the construction of an art world of avant-garde film in the institutional frameworks of production, distribution, exhibition, and criticism. Through these various avenues, Mekas has cultivated the appreciation of film as a fine art form. As editor-in-chief of Film Culture in the 1950s, Mekas promoted the politique des auteurs, or auteurism, advanced by the critics of the French journal Cahiers du cinema. Auteurism, as a theory of film criticism, prizes films, and especially Hollywood productions, to the extent that they may be seen as manifestations of an individual controlling sensibility, embodying the worldview of an author. Auteurism provides a framework for appreciating as art the products of the commercial film industry. As in the more traditional art forms