The Close-up

This week on the Film at Lincoln Center podcast, we’re featuring a programmer's preview of our Jonas Mekas Retrospective with FLC Jr. Programmer Dan Sullivan, followed by a Q&A from the 59th New York Film Festival with Flee director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, moderated by NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez. Few if any figures in the history of New York City film culture have left as large a mark as that of the Lithuanian filmmaker, critic, and poet Jonas Mekas. Rising to notoriety in the 1950s and ’60s as a champion of and mouthpiece for the New American Cinema, he founded and presided over such stalwart fixtures of the underground and avant-garde film scenes as Film Culture magazine, the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and Anthology Film Archives. But he was also one of the 20th century’s most vital film artists, a master cine-diarist and something like a present-tense historian who documented the particulars of emigrant life in New York City. Featuring 16mm screenings, our Jonas Mekas Retro