Film Culture magazine
Related: Jonas Mekas - film criticism
In 1954 Mekas published the first issue of Film Culture, America's iconoclastic answer to Cahiers du Cinema. Originally devoted to auteurist criticism. [Sept 2006]
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In 1954 Mekas published the first issue of Film Culture, America's iconoclastic answer to Cahiers du Cinema. Originally devoted to auteurist criticism, featuring Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Herman Weinberg and many others, Film Culture eventually became the mouthpiece of the American avant-garde. --http://www.cinemadmag.com/print_issue_six_jonas_mekas.htm
To support rarely-reviewed experimental cinema, you founded the distinguished magazine Film Culture in 1955. A few years later, you started your influential column Movie Journal in the Village Voice. You still collaborate with international movie magazines, such as the British Sight and Sound, the Italian Bianco e Nero and of course, the French Cahiers du Cinéma. May I add that you also published many poetic works in Lithuanian. --http://www.frenchculture.org/people/honorees/mekas.html [Aug 2004]
Adolfas Mekas, Hallelujah the Hills (1963)
Adolfas Mekas, born in Lithuania, arrived in the United States with his brother Jonas in 1949. They founded Film Culture, the magazine of independent cinema, in 1954. Adolfas Mekas’s Hallelujah the Hills bears witness to his knowledge and love of cinema, as well as the immense freedom to be found in all the films of the New American Cinema.Replete with innovative cinematic homages ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Jean-Luc Godard, Hallelujah the Hills is a paean to the cinema and, in the words of its creator, "a song of love, friendship, and youth." Mekas’s story follows two young men (Peter H. Beard and Marty Greenbaum) who have for seven years been courting the same woman (played by both Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans). When they return to propose marriage in the eighth year, they discover that she has already wed another man. The jilted suitors embark on a camping trip in the Vermont woodlands where comic romps are punctuated by bittersweet recollections of the woman.
Recognizing the freshness of Mekas’s offbeat style, Richard Roud wrote in Sight and Sound, “The film has a Griffithian flavor, a lyrical naivete, which is extremely touching… In short, this is one of the most completely American films ever made, in its combination of anarchistic wackiness with a nostalgic sense of the lost frontier and magic of youth,” and Time Magazine praised the film as “a far-out and very funny farce, the first cubistic comedy of the new world cinema.”
“Even avowed enemies of the New American Cinema were impressed by the film’s lack of pretensions and its unexpected lyricism and Zen serenity in the midst of nervous parody.” — Andrew Sarris, Village Voice, 1963
--http://usa.re-voir.com/amekas.html [Aug 2004]
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